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1377 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 

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Shelf x.E.7T 



UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



AN ESSAY 



IN 



REFUTATION OF ATHEISM 



BY 



-V 



0. A. BROWNSON. 



• EDITED BY 



II K N H Y F. BROWNSON. 



DETROIT: 

THORNDIKE NOURSE. 




1882. 



Entered according to the Act of Congress, in the year 1832, by 
HENRY F. BROWNSON, 
In the Office of the Librarian of Congress at Washington, D. C. 



CONTENTS. 



Page. 

Introduction 1 

Theism in Possession 4 

The Atheist Cannot Turn the Presumption. 9 

No Furely Cosmic Science 13 

Theologians and the Scientists 24 

Inconclusive Proofs 32 

Analysis of Thought 40 

Analysts of the Object 46 

Analysis of the Ideal 56 

Analysis of the Relation . .; 62 

The Fact of Creation 67 

Existences 76 

God as Final Cause 81 

Obligation of Worship 88 

Tradition 94 



PREFACE 

TO 

AH ESSAY 1 REFUTATION OF ATHEISM. 



It is not without some misgiving that I present the following essay to 
the public; not, indeed, because I have any lack of confidence in the 
soundness of its principles, or the combined analytical and synthetic pro- 
cesses by which I attempt to demonstrate the existence of God, the fact 
of creation, providence, the moral law, and the ground of man's moral 
obligation to worship God; but from a consciousness of my inability to 
do justice to the great thesis I have undertaken to defend, and my dis- 
trust of the disposition of the public to receive and read with patience 
what is most likely to be treated as a metaphysical disquisition, and 
therefore as worthless. Nobody now reads metaphysical works, or any 
works that pertain to the higher philosophy, and especially such as 
attempt to vindicate theology as the science of sciences. 

All I can say is, that my essay is not metaphysical in the ordinary 
acceptation of the term, does not attempt to construct a science of 
abstractions, which are null, and deals only with concretes, with reali- 
ties. Some of the problems, and the analyses by which I attempt to 
solve them, may be regarded as abstruse, difficult, and foreign from the 
ordinary current of thought, as all such discussions must necessarily be; 
but I have done my best to make my statements and reasonings clear and 
distinct, plain and intelligible to men of ordinary understanding and 
intellectual culture. 



vi 



PREFACE. 



The greatest difficulty the reader will find arises from the fact that I 
have not followed the more common methods of proving the existence of 
God, and that while I have broached no new system of philosophy, 
I have adopted an unfamiliar method of demonstration, though in my 
judgment rendered necessary by the logic of the case. I follow neither the 
ontological method, nor the psychological method, and adopt neither the 
argument a priori, nor the argument a posteriori, and while I maintain 
that the principles of all the real and the knowable are intuitively given 
I deny that we know that being or God is by intuition. 

I have borrowed from Plato and Aristotle, St. Augustine and St. 
Thomas, from Cousin and Gioberti, heathen and Christian, orthodox and 
heterodox what I found to my purpose, but I follow no one any further 
than he follows what I hold to be demonstrable or undeniable truth. I 
have freely criticized and rejected the teachings of eminent authors, for 
some of whom I have a profound reverence, but I think my criticisms 
carry their own justification with them. I have adopted the Ideal formula, 
Ens creat exisientias, asserted by Gioberti; but not till I have by my own 
analysis of thought, the objective element of thought, and the ideal ele- 
ment of the object, been forced to accept it; and whether I explain and 
apply it or not in Ms sense, I certainly take it in none of the senses that, 
to my knowledge, have been objected to by his critics. I am not a fol- 
lower of Gioberti; he is not my master; but I cannot reject a truth 
because he has defended it ; and to refuse to name him, and give him 
credit where credit is honestly his due, because he is in bad odor with a 
portion of the public, would be an act of meanness and cowardice of 
which I trust I am incapable. 

My essay ought to be acceptable to all who profess to be Christians. 
What my religion is all the world knows that knows me at all. I am an 
uncompromising Catholic, and on all proper occasions I glory in avow- 
ing my adherence to the See of Rome, and in defending the Catholic 
faith, and the Roman Pontiff now gloriously reigning, the Vicar of 
Christ, and Supreme Head and infallible teacher of the Universal Church. 
Such being the fact, there would be a want of good taste as well as 



PREFACE. 



vii 



manliness in seeking to disguise or to conceal it. But in this work I 
have had no occasion to discuss any question on which there are any 
differences among those who profess to be Christians, and I have only 
defended, not the faith, but the preamble to faith, as St. Thomas calls it, 
against the common enemy of God and man. 

I have embodied in this comparatively brief essay the results of my 
reading and reflections during a long life on the grounds of science, 
religion, and ethics; they may not be worth much, but I give them to 
the public for what they are worth. They do not solve all the questions 
that the ingenious and the subtile critic may raise, and fairly respond to 
all the objections that sophists and cavillers may adduce; but I think the 
work indicates a method which will be useful to many minds, and, if 
it converts no atheist, will at least tend to confirm Christians in the 
fundamental article of their faith, and to put them on their guard against 
the seductions of a satanic philosophy and a false, but arrogant science 
to which they are everywhere exposed. I have written to save the cause 
of truth and sound philosophy, and, in all humility, I submit what I 
have written to the protection of Him whose honor and glory I have 
wished to serve, and to the infallible judgment of his Vicar on earth. 

O. A. BROWNSON. 

Elizabeth, N. J., March, 1872. 



ESSAY IN REFUTATION OF ATHEISM. 



[From Brownson's Quarterly Review for 1873-4.] 
I. INTRODUCTION. 

Tite age of heresy is virtually past. Ileresy, in its pro- 
gressive developments, has successively arraigned and 
rejected every article in the creed, from " Patrem omnipo- 
tentem" down to " Yitam aeternam." Following its essential 
nature, that of arbitrary choice among revealed mysteries 
and dogmas, of what it will rejector retain, it has eliminated 
one after another, till it has nothing distinctively Christian 
remaining, or to distinguish it from pure, unmitigated 
rationalism and downright naturalism. It retains with the 
men and women of the advanced, or movement party, 
hardly a dim and fading reminiscence of the supernatural, 
and may be said to have exhausted itself, and gone so fax 
that it can go no further. 

No new heresy is possible. The pressing, the living con- 
troversy of the day is not between orthodoxy and heterodoxy, 
which virtually ended with Bossuet's IJistoire des Varia- 
tions du J J rotesta?Uisme, and the issue is now between 
Christianity and infidelity, faith and unbelief, religion and 
no religion, the worship of God the Creator, or the idolatry 
of man and nature — in a word between theism and atheism ;. 
for pantheism, so fearfully prevalent in modern philosophy, 
is only a form of atheism, and in substance differs not from 
what the fool says in ins heart, Non est Deus. Not all 
on either side, however, have as yet become aware that this 
is the real issue, or that the old controversy between the 
orthodox and the heterodox, or the church and the sects, is 
not still a living controversy ; but all on either side who 
have looked beneath the surface, and marked the tendencies 
of modern thought and of modern theories widely received, 
in their principles if not in their developments, are well 
aware that the exact question at issue is no longer the church, 
but back of it in the domain of science and philosophy, and 
is simply, God or no God ? 

The scientific theories in vogue are all atheistic, or have 
at least an atheistic tendency ; for they all seek to explain, 

Vol. n.— 1 



2 



REFUTATION OF ATHEISM 



man and the universe, or the cosmos, without the recognition 
of God as its first or its final cause. Even the philosophical 
systems that professedly combat atheism and materialism, 
fail to recognize the fact of creation from nothing, assume 
the production of the cosmos by way of emanation, forma- 
tion, or evolution, which is only a form of atheism. Even 
philosophical theories which profess to demonstrate the 
existence of God, bind him fast or completely hedge him 
in by what they call " the laws of nature," deny him per- 
sonality or the last complement of rational nature, and take 
from him his liberty or freedom of action, which is really 
to deny him, or, what is the same thing, to absorb him in 
the cosmos. 

The ethical theories of our moral philosophers have 
equally an atheistical tendency. They all seek a basis for 
virtue without the recognition of God, the creative act, or 
the divine will. Some place the ethical principle in self- 
interest, some in utility, some in instinct, some in what they 
call a moral sense, amoral sentiment, or in a subjective idea; 
others, in acting according to truth ; others, in acting accord- 
ing to the fitness of things, or in reference to universal 
order. Popular literature, written or inspired in no small 
part by women, places it in what it calls love, and in doing 
what love dictates. The love, however, is instinctive, car- 
ries its own reason and justification in itself, refuses to be 
morally bound, and shrinks from the very thought of duty 
or obligation — a love that moves and operates as one of the 
great elemental forces of nature, as attraction, gravitation, 
the wind, the storm, or the lightning. The Christian doc- 
trine that makes virtue consist in voluntary obedience to the 
law of God as our sovereign, our final cause, and finds the 
basis of moral obligation in our relation to God as his creat- 
ures, created for him as their last end, is hardly entertained 
by any class of modern ethical philosophers, even when they 
profess to be Christians. 

In politics, the same tendency to eliminate God from 
society and the state is unmistakable. The statesmen and 
political philosophers who base their politics oh principles 
derived from theology are exceptions to the rule, and are 
regarded as "behind the age." Political atheism, or' the 
assumption that the secular order is independent of the spir- 
itual, and can and should exist and act without regard to it, 
is the popular doctrine throughout Europe and 'America, 
alike with monarchists and republicans, and is at the bot- 



INTRODUCTION. 



3 



torn of all the revolutionary movements of the last century 
and the present. Nothing can be said that will he received 
with more general repugnance by the men of the age than 
the assertion of the supremacy of the spiritual order, or the 
denial that the secular is independent, — supreme. 

If we glance at the various projects of reform,- moral, 
political, or social, which are put forth from day to day in 
such numbers and with so much confidence, we shall see 
that they are all pervaded by one and the same atheistic 
thought. We see it in the late Robert Owen's scheme of 
parallelograms, which avowedly assumed that the race had 
hitherto been afflicted by a trinity of evils of which it is 
necessary to get rid, namely, property, marriage, and reli- 
gion ; we see it it in the phalanstery of Charles Fourier, 
based on passional harmony, or rather on passional indul- 
gence ; we see it also in the International Association of 
working men, who would seem to be moved by a personal 
hatred of God ; finally, we see it in the mystic republic of 
the late Mazzini, who though he accepts, in name, God and 
religion, yet makes the people God, and popular instincts 
religion. The Saint-Simonians, with their Nouvean Chris- 
tianisme, are decidedly pantheists, and the Comtists recog- 
nize and worship no God but the grand collective being, 
humanity ; Proudhon declared that we must deny God, or 
not be able to assert liberty. 

This rapid sketch is sufficient to bear out the statement 
that the living controversy of the day is not between ortho- 
dox and heterodox Christians, but between Christianity and 
atheism, or, what is the same thing, Christianity and pan- 
theism. The battle is not even for supernatural revelation, 
but for God, the Creator and End of man and the universe, 
for natural reason and natural society, for the very principle 
of intellectual, moral, and social life. It is all very well 
for those excellent people whomever look beyond their own 
convictions or prejudices to tell us that atheism is absurd, 
and that we need not trouble ourselves about it, for no man 
in his senses is, or can be, an atheist. But let no one lay 
this" flattering unction to his soul." Facts, too painfully 
certain to be disputed, and too numerous to be unheeded by 
any one who attends at all to what is going on under his 
very eyes, prove the contrary. The fools are not all dead, 
and a new crop is born every year. 

The Internationals are avowed atheists, and they boast 
that their association, which is but of yesterday, has already 



4 



REFUTATION OF ATHEISM. 



(1871) two millions of men in France enrolled in its ranks, 
and four millions in the rest of Europe. Is this nothing ? 
What their principles are, and what their conduct may be 
expected to be, the murders and incendiarisms of the Paris- 
Commune, which their chiefs approved, have sufficiently 
taught us. But, under the guise of science and free thought, 
men of the highest intellectual, literary, and social standing, 
like Ralph Waldo Emerson and his disciples, like Charles 
Darwin, Sir John Lubbock, Professors Huxley and Tynclall, 
Herbert Spencer, Emile Littre, and the Positivists or wor- 
shippers of humanity, to say nothing of the Hegelians of 
Germany and the majority of the medical profession, are 
daily and hourly propagating atheism, open or disguised, in 
our higher literary and cultivated classes. The ablest and 
most approved organs of public opinion in Great Britain 
and the United States, France and Germany, either defend 
atheistic science, or treat its advocates with great respect 
and tenderness, as if the questions they raise were purely 
speculative, and without any practical bearing on the great 
and vital interests of man and societ}^ There may be, and 
we trust there is, much faith, much true piety left in Chris- 
tendom ; but public opinion, we may say the official opinion, 
— the opinion that linds expression in nearly all modern 
governments and legislation, — is antichristian, and between 
Christianity and atheism there is no middle ground, no legit- 
imate halting place. 

It certainly, then, is not a work uncalled for, to subject 
the atheistic and false theistic theories of the day to a brief 
but rigid examination. The problem we have to solve is 
the gravest problem that can occupy the human intellect or 
the human heart, the individual or society. It is, whether 
there is a God who has created the world from nothing, who 
is our "first cause and our last cause, who has made us for 
himself as our supreme good, who sustains and governs us 
by his providence, and has the right to our obedience and 
worship; or whether we are in the world, coming we know 
not whence, and going we know not whither, without any 
rule of life or purpose in our existence. 

n. THEISM IN POSSESSION. 

An atheist is one who is not a theist. Atheists may be 
divided into two classes, positive and negative. Positive 
atheists are those who deny positively the existence of God r 



ATHEISM IN POSSESSION. 



5 



and profess to be able to prove that God is not ; negative 
atheists are those, who, if they do not deny positively that 
God is, maintain that he is unknowable, that we have, and 
can have no proof of his existence, no reason for asserting 
it, for the hypothesis of a God explains and accounts 
for nothing. Of this latter class of atheists are the Comtists 
and the Cosmists, or those who take Auguste Comte for their 
master and those who swear by Herbert Spencer. 

False theists or pantheists reject the name of atheists, and 
yet are not essentially distinguishable from them. They are 
divided into several classes : 1, the emanationists, or those 
who hold that all things emanate, as the stream from the 
fountain, from the one only being or substance which they 
call God, and return at length to him and are reabsorbed in 
him ; 2, the generationists, or those who hold that the one 
only being or substance is in itself both male and female, 
and generates the world from itself ; 3, the formationists, or 
those who, like Plato and Aristotle, hold that God produces 
all things by giving form to a preexisting and eternal mat- 
ter, as an artificer constructs a house or a temple with mate- 
rials furnished to his hand ; 4, the ontologists, or Spinozists, 
who assert that nothing is or exists, but being or substance, 
with its attributes or modes ; 5, the psychologists or egoists, 
or those who assert that nothing exists but the soul, the Ego, 
and its productions, modes, or affections, as maintained by 
Fichte. 

There are various other shades of pantheism 4 but all pan- 
theists coalesce and agree in denying the creative act of 
being producing all things from nothing, and all, except the 
formationists, represented by Plato and Aristotle, agree in 
maintaining that there is only one substance, and that the 
cosmos emanates from it, is generated by it, or is its attri- 
bute, mode, affection, or phenomenon. The characteristic 
of pantheism is the denial of creation from nothing and the 
creation of substantial existences or second causes, that is, 
existences capable, when sustained by the lirst cause, of act- 
ing from their own centre and producing effects of their 
own. Plato and Aristotle approach nearer to theism than 
any other class of pantheists, and if they had admitted cre- 
ation they would not be pantheists at all, but theists. 

Omitting the philosophers of the Academy and the Lyceum, 
all pantheists admit only one substance, which is the sub- 
stance or reality of the cosmos, on which all the cosmic 
phenomena depend for their reality, and of which they are 



6 



REFUTATION OF ATHEISM. 



simply appearances or manifestations. Here pantheism and 
atheism coincide, and are one and the same ; for whether 
you call this one substance God, soul, or nature, makes not 
the least difference in the world, since you assert nothing 
above or distinguishable from the cosmos. Pantheism may 
be the more subtle form, but is none the less a form of athe- 
ism, and pantheists are really only atheists ; for they assert 
no God distinct from nature, above it, and its creator. 

Pantheism is the earliest form of atheism, the first depart- 
ure from theology, and is not regarded by those who accept 
it as atheism at all. It undoubtedly retains many theistical 
conceptions around which the religious sentiments may linger 
for a time ; yet it is no-theism and no-theism is atheism. 
Pantheism, if one pleases, is inchoate atheism, the first step 
in the descent from theism, as complete atheism is the last. 
It is the germ of which atheism is the blossom or the ripe 
fruit. Pantheism is a misconception of the relation of cause 
and effect, and the beginning of the corruption of the ideal ; 
atheism is its total corruption and loss. It is implicit not 
explicit atheism, as every heresy is implicitly though not 
explicitly the total denial of Christianity, since Christianity 
is an indivisible whole. In this sense, and in this sense only, 
are pantheism and atheism distinguishable. 

Pantheism in some of its forms underlies all the ancient 
and modern heathen mythologies ; and nothing is more absurd 
than to suppose that these mythologies were primitive, and 
that Christianity has been gradually developed from them. 
Men could not deny God before his existence had been 
asserted, nor could they identify him with the substance or 
reality manifested in the cosmic phenomena if they had no 
notion of his existence. Pantheism and atheism presuppose 
theism ; for the denial cannot precede the affirmation, and 
either is unintelligible without it, as Protestantism presup- 
poses and is unintelligible without the church in commun- 
ion with the See of Rome against which it protests. The 
assertion of the papal supremacy necessarily preceded its 
denial. Dr. Draper, Sir John Lubbock, as well as a host of 
others, maintain that the more perfect forms of religion 
have been developed from the less perfect, as Professor 
Huxley maintains that life is developed from protoplasm, 
and protoplasm from proteine, and Charles Darwin that the 
higher species of animals have been developed from the 
lower, man from the ape or some one of the monkey tribe, 
by the gradual operation for ages of what he calls " natural 
selection." 



THEISM IN POSSESSION. 



'7 



It has almost passed into an axiom that the human race 
began, as to religion, in feticliism, and passed progressively 
through the various forms and stages of polytheism up to the 
sublime monotheism of the Jews and Christians; yet the 
only authority for it is that it chimes in with the general 
theory of progress held by a class of an ti christian theorists 
and socialists, but which has itself no basis in science, his- 
tory, or philosophy. So far as history goes, the monotheism 
of the Jews and Christians is older than polytheism, older 
than feticliism, and in fact, as held by the patriarchs, was 
the primitive religion of mankind. There is no earlier his- 
torical record extant than Genesis* and in that we find the 
recognition and worship of one only God, Creator of the 
heavens and the earth, as well established as subsequently 
with the Jews and Christians. The oldest of the Vedas are 
the least corrupt and superstitious of the sacred books of the 
Hindoos, but the theology even of the oldest and purest is 
decidedly pantheistic, which as we have said, presupposes 
theism, and never could have preceded the theistical theol- 
ogy. Pantheism may be developed by way of corruption 
from theism, but theism can never be developed in any sense 
from pantheism. 

All the Gentile religions or superstitions, if carefully 
examined and scientifically analyzed, are seen to have 
their type in the patriarchal religion, — the type, be it under- 
stood, from which they have receded, but not the ideal 
which they are approaching and struggling to realize. They 
all have their ideal in the past, and each points to a perfec- 
tion once possessed, but now lost. Over them all hovers 
the memory of a departed glory. The genii, devs, or divi, 
the good and the bad demons of the heathen mythologies, 
are evidently travesties of the Biblical doctrine of good and 
bad angels. The doctrine of the fall, of expiation and repa- 
ration by tli e suffering and death of a God or Divine Person, 
which meets us under various forms in all the Indo-Ger- 
manic or Aryan mythologies, and indeed in all the known 
mythologies of the world, are evidently derived from the 
teachings of the patriarchal or primitive religion of the 
race, — not the Christian doctrine of original sin, redemp- 
tion, and reparation by the passion and death of Our Lord, 
from them. The heathen doctrines on all these points are 
mingled with too many silly fables, too many superstitious 
details and revolting and indecent incidents, to have been 
primitive, and clearly prove that they are a primitive doc- 



8 



REFUTATION OF ATHEISM. 



trine corrupted. The purest and simplest forms are always 
the earliest. 

We see, also, in all these heathen mythologies, traces or 
reminiscences of an original belief in the unity of God. 
Above all the Dii Majores and the Dii Minores there hovers, 
so to' speak, dimly and indistinctly it may be, one supreme 
and ever-living God, to whom Saturn, Jupiter, Juno, Venus, 
Vulcan, Mars, Dis, and all the other gods and goddesses to 
whom temples were erected and sacrifices were offered, were 
inferior and subject. It is true the heathen regarded him 
as inaccessible and inexorable; paid him no distinctive wor- 
ship, and denominated him Fate or Destiny ; yet it is clear 
that in the to iv of the Alexandrians, the Eternity of the 
Persians, above both Ormuzd and Ahriman, the heathen 
retained at least an obscure and fading reminiscence of the 
unity and supremacy of the one God of tradition. They 
knew him, but they did not, when they knew him, worship 
him as God, but gave his glory unto creatures or empty 
idols. 

We deny, then, that fetichism or any other form of 
heathenism is or can be the primitive or earliest religion of 
mankind. The primitive or earliest known religion of man- 
kind was a purely theistical religion. Monotheism is, his- 
torically as well as logically, older than polytheism; the 
worship of God preceded the worship of nature, the ele- 
ments, the sun, moon, and stars of heaven, or the demons 
swarming in the air. Christian faith is in substance older 
than pantheism, as pantheism is older than undisguised 
atheism. Christian theism is the oldest creed, as well as the 
oldest philosophy of mankind, and has been from the first 
and still is the creed of the living and progressive portion 
of the human race. 

Christianity claims, as every body knows, to be the prim- 
itive and universal religion, and to be based on absolutely 
catholic principles. Always and everywhere held, though 
not held by all individuals, or even nations, free from all 
admixture of error and superstition. Yet analyze all the 
heathen religions, eliminate all their differences, as Mr. 
Herbert Spencer proposes, take what is positive or affirm- 
ative, permanent, universal, in them, as distinguished from 
what in them is negative, limited, local, variable, or tran- 
sitory, and you will have remaining the principles of Chris- 
tianity as found in the patriarchal religion, as held in the 
Synagogue, and taught by the Church of Christ. These 



THEISM IN POSSESSION. 



9 



principles are all absolutely catholic or universal, and hence 
Christianity, in its essential principles at least, is really the 
universal religion, and in possession as such. The presump- 
tion, as say the lawyers, is then decidedly in favor of the 
Christian and against the atheist. 

Christianity, again, not only asserts God and his provi- 
dence as its fundamental principle, but claims to be the law 
of God, supernatn rally revealed to man, or the revelation 
which he has made of himself, of his providence, of his 
will, and of what he exacts of his rational creatures. Then, 
again, Christianity asserts, in principle, only the catholic or 
universal belief of the race. The belief in God, in provi- 
dence, natural power, and in supernatural intervention in 
human affairs in some form, is universal. Even the atheist 
shudders at a ghost story, and is surprised by sudden danger 
into a prayer. Men and nations may in their ignorance or 
superstition misconceive and misrepresent the Divinity, but 
they could not do so, if they had no belief that God is. 
Prayer to God or the gods, which is universal, is full proof 
of the universality of the belief in Divine Providence and 
in supernatural intervention. Hence, again, the presump- 
tion is in favor of Christian theism and against th^ atheist. 

Of course, this universal belief, or this consensus hominum, 
is not adduced here as full proof of the truth of Christianity, 
or of the catholic principles on which it rests ; but it is 
adduced as a presumptive proof of Christianity and against 
atheism, while it undeniably throws the burden of proof on 
the atheist, or whoever questions it. It is not enough for 
the atheist to deny God, providence, and the supernatural ; 
he must sustain his denial by proofs strong enough, at least, 
to turn the presumption against Christianity, before lie can 
oblige or compel the Christian to plead. Till then, " So I 
and my fathers have always held," is all the reply he is 
required to make to any one that would oust him. 

m. THE ATHEIST CANNOT THEN THE PRESUMPTION, 

But can the atheist turn the presumption, and turn it 
against the theist? It perhaps will be more difficult to do 
it than he imagines. It is very easy to say that the universal 
fact which the Christian adduces originated in ignorance, 
which the progress of science has dissipated ; but this is not 
enough : the atheist must prove that it has actually origi- 
nated in men's ignorance, and not in their knowledge, and 



10 



REFUTATION OF ATHEISM. 



that the alleged progress of science, so far as it bears on this 
question, is not itself an illusion; for he must bear in mind 
that the burden of proof rests on him, since theism is in 
possession and the presumption is against him. Is it certain ' 
that Christians have less science than atheists? As far as 
our observation goes, the atheist may have more of theory 
and be richer in bold denials and in unsupported assertions, 
but he has somewhat less of science than the Christian theo- 
logian. The alleged progress of science, be it greater or 
less, throws no light one way or another on the question; 
for it is confessedly confined to a region below that of reli- 
gion, and does not rise above or extend beyond the cosmos. 

The latest and ablest representatives of the atheistical 
science of the a^e are the Positivists, or followers of Au^uste 
Comte, and the Cosmists, or admirers of Herbert Spencer, and 
neither of these pretend that their science has demonstrated or 
can demonstrate that God is not. Mr. John Fiske, who last 
year (1870) was a Comtist, and who is this year (1871) a Cos- 
mist says, in one of his lectures before Harvard College, very 
distinctly, that they have not. He says, speaking of God 
and religion: "We are now in a region where absolute 
demonstration, in the scientific sense, is impossible. It. is 
beyond the power of science to prove that a personal God 
either exists or does not exist." This is express, and is not 
affected by the interjection of the word personal, for an 
impersonal God is no God at all, but is simply nature or the 
cosmos, and indistinguishable from it. The lecturer, after 
admitting the inability of science to prove there is no God, 
proceeds to criticise the arguments usually adduced to prove 
that God is, and to show that they are all inconclusive. 
Suppose him successful in this, which, by the way, he is not, 
he proves nothing to the purpose. The insufficiency of the 
arguments alleged to prove that God is, does not entitle him 
to conclude that God is not, and creates no presumption that 
he is not. He cannot conclude from their insufficiency that 
science is capable of overcoming the great fact the Christian 
adduces, and which creates presumption against atheism. 

It is, no doubt, true, that both the Comtists and Cosmists 
deny that they are atheists ; but they are evidently what we 
have called negative atheists ; for they do not assert that 
God is, and maintain that there is no evidence or proof of 
his existence. If they do not positively deiry it, they cer- 
tainly do not affirm it. They admit, indeed, an infinite 
power, Force, or Reality, underlying the cosmic phenomena, 



THE ATHEIST CANNOT TURN THE PRESUMPTION. 11 



and of which the phenomena are manifestations ; but this 
does not relieve them of atheism, for it is not independent 
of the cosmos or distinguishable from it. It is simply the 
cosmos itself — the substance or reality — that appears in the 
cosmic phenomena. It, then, is not God, and they do not 
call it God, and avowedly reject what they call the " theist- 
ical hypothesis." 

Yet both sects agree in this, that they have no science 
that disproves the " theistical hypothesis," or that does or 
can prove the falsity of the great catholic principles asserted 
in the universal beliefs of the race. Mr. Fiske, in his lec- 
ture, says: " We cannot therefore expect to obtain a result 
which, like a mathematical theorem, shall stand firm through 
mere weight of logic, or which, like a theorem in physics, can 
be subjected to a crucial test. We can only examine the argu- 
ments on which the theistic hypothesis is founded, and 
inquire whether they are of such a character as to be con- 
vincing and satisfactory If it turns out that these 

arguments are not .... satisfactory, it will follow that, as 
the cosmic philosophy becomes more and more widely 
understood and accepted, the theistical hypothesis will gen- 
erally fall into discredit, not because it will have been dis- 
proved but because there will be no sufficient warrant for 
maintaining it." This is a full and frank confession that 
science does not and cannot disprove Christian theism, and 
that the hope of the Cosmists to get it superseded by the 
cosmic philosophy, does not rest on disproving it, but in per- 
suading men that there "is no sufficient warrant for main- 
taining it." But, if science cannot disprove theism, the 
presumption remains good against atheism, and the Christian 
theist is not required to produce his title deeds or proofs. 
Till then, the argument from prescription or possession is 
all the warrant he needs. 

But the confession that science cannot prove that God is 
not, is the confession that the atheist has no scientific truth 
to oppose Christian theism, but only a theory, an opinion, 
a " mental habit," without any scientific support. In the 
passage last quoted from Mr. Fiske we have marked an 
omission. The part of the sentence omitted is, " none who 
rigidly adhere to the doctrine of evolution, who assert the 
relativity of all knowledge, and who refuse to reason on the 
subjective method." There can be no doubt that the doc- 
trine of evolution and the relativity of all knowledge is 
incompatible, as Mr. Fiske and his master, Herbert Spencer, 



12 



REFUTATION OF ATHEISMS 



maintain, with Christian theism, or the assertion that God 
is. But as science cannot prove that God is not, it follows 
that the doctrine of evolution and the relativity of all knowl- 
edge, which the Cosmists oppose to the existence of God, is 
not and cannot be scientifically proved, and is simply a theory 
or hypothesis, not science, and counts for nothing in the 
argument. In confessing their inability to demonstrate 
what the fool says in his heart, Eon est Deus, God is not, 
they confess their inability to demonstrate their doctrine of 
evolution, and the relativity of all knowledge. They also 
thus confess that they have no science to oppose theism, and 
they expect it to perish, in the words of Mr. Fiske, " as 
other doctrines have perished, through lack of the mental 
predisposition to accept it." This should dispose of the 
objection to Christian theism drawn from pretended science, 
and it leaves the presumption still against atheism, as we 
have found it. 

It is hardly necessary to remark that the presumption in 
favor of theism cannot be overcome, and the burden of proof 
thrown on the theist by any alleged theory or hypothesis which 
is not itself demonstrated or proved. The atheist must 
prove that his theory or hypothesis is scientifically true, 
which of course the cosmic philosophers, who assert the 
theory of evolution and of the relativity of all knowledge, 
cannot do. If all knowledge is relative, there is then no 
absolute knowledge ; if no absolute knowledge, the Cosmists 
can neither absolutely know nor prove that all knowledge is 
relative. The proof of the theory of the relativity of all 
knowledge would consequently be its refutation ; for then all 
knowledge would not be relative, to wit, the knowledge that 
all knowledge is relative. The theory is then self-contradic- 
tory, or an unprovable and an uncertain opinion ; and an 
uncertain opinion is insufficient to oust theism from its 
immemorial possession. The atheist must allege against it 
positive truth, or facts susceptible of being positively proved, 
or gain no standing in court. 

According to the Cosmists, there is no absolute science, and 
science itself is a variable and uncertain thing. Mr. Fiske 
tells us that in 1870 he was a Comtist or Positivist, and 
defended, in his course of lectures of that year, the '* Philo- 
sophic Positive ;" but in this year (1871) he holds and 
defends the cosmic philosophy, which he says "dilf rs from 
it almost fundamentally." The Comtean philosophy absorbs 
the cosmos in man and society; the cosmic philosophy 



THE ATHEIST CANNOT TURN THE PRESUMPTION. 13 



includes man and society in the cosmos, as it does minerals, 
vegetables, animals, apes and tadpoles, and subjects them all 
alike to one and the same universal law of evolution. This, 
our cosmic or Spencerian philosopher assures us, is science 
to-day. But who can say " what it will be fifty years hence, 
or what modifications of it the unremitted investigations of 
scientific men into the cosmic phenomena and their laws will 
necessitate.' 7 There is and can be no real, invariable, and 
permanent science, yet the cosmic philosophers see no absurd- 
ity in asking the race to give up its universal beliefs on the 
authority of their present theory, and nothing wrong in try- 
ing to spread their ever-shifting, ever- varying science and 
make it supersede in men's minds the Christian principles of 
God, creation, and providence, although they confess that it 
may turn out on inquiry to be false. 

There is no doubt that, if the cosmic philosophers could 
get their pretended science generally accepted, they would 
do much to generate a habit or disposition of mind very 
unfavorable to the recognition of Christian theism ; but that 
would be no argument for the truth of their science or phi- 
losophy. The Cosinists — a polite name for atheists — fail to 
recognize theism, not because they have or pretend to have 
any scientific evidence of its falsity, but really because it 
does not lie in the sphere of their investigations. "I have 
never seen God at the end of my telescope," said the astron- 
omer, Lalande ; yet perhaps it never occurred to him that if 
there were no God, there could be no astronomy. The 
Cosmists confine their investigations to the cosmic phenom- 
ena and their laws, and God is neither a cosmic phenomenon 
nor a cosmic law ; how then should they recognize him ? 
They do not find God, because he is not in the order of facts 
with which they are engrossed, though not one of those 
facts does or could exist without him. 

IV. NO PURELY COSMIC SCIENCE. 

Theism being in possession, and holding from prescrip- 
tion, can be ousted only by establishing the title of an 
adverse claimant. This, we have seen, the atheist cannot 
do. The cosmic philosophers confess that science is unable 
to prove that God is not. They confess, then, that they 
have no scientific truth to oppose to his being, or that con- 
tradicts it. It is true, they add, that science is equally 
unable to prove that God is ; but that is our affair, and per- 



REFUTATION OF ATHEISM. 



haps we shall, before we close, prove the contrary. But it 
is enough for us at present to know that the Cosmists or 
atheists confess that they have no scientific truth that proves 
that God is not. 

Indeed they do not propose to get rid of Christian theism 
by disproving it, or by proving their atheism, but by turn- 
ing away the mind from its contemplation, and generating 
in the community habits of mind adverse to its reception. 
Take the following extract from one of Mr. Fiske's lectures 
in proof : 

"It is, indeed, generally true that theories concerning the supernatural 
perish, not from extraneous violence, but from inanition. The belief in 
witchcraft, or the physical intervention of the devil in human affairs, is 
now laughed at; yet two centuries have hardly elapsed since it was held 
by learned and sensible men, as an essential part of Christianity. It was 
supported by an immense amount of testimony which no one has ever 
refuted in detail. No one has ever disproved witchcraft, as Young dis- 
proved the corpuscular theory of light. But the belief has died out 
because scientific cultivation has rendered tlie mental soil unfit for it. 
The contemporaries of Bodin were so thoroughly predisposed by their 
general theory of things to believe in the continual intervention of the 
devil, that it needed but the slightest evidence to make them credit any 
particular act of intervention. But to the educated men of to-day such 
intervention seems too improbable to be admitted on any amount of tes- 
timony. The hypothesis of diabolic interference is simply ruled out, and 
will remain ruled out. 

"So with Spiritualism (spiritism), the modern form of totemism, or 
the belief in the physical intervention of the souls of the dead in human 
affairs. Men of science decline to waste their time in arguing against it, 
because they know that the only way in which to destroy it is to educate 
people in science. Spiritualism (spiritism) is simply one of the weeds 
which spring up in minds uncultivated by science. There is no use in 
pulling up one form of the superstition by the roots, for another form, 
equally noxious, is sure to take root; the only way of insuring the 
destruction ol the pests is to sow the seeds of scientific truth. When, 
therefore, we are gravely told what persons of undoubted veracity have 
seen, we are affected about as if a friend should come in and assure us 
upon his honor as a gentleman that heat is not a mode of motion. 

" The case is the same with the belief in miracles, or the physical inter- 
vention of the Deity in human affairs. To the theologian such interven- 
tion is a priori so probable that he needs but slight historic testimony to 
make him believe in it. To the scientific thinker it is a priori so improb- 
able, that no amount of historic testimony, such as can be produced, 
suffices to make him entertain the hypothesis for an instant. Hence it 
is that such critics as Strauss and Eenan, to the great disgust of theolo- 



NO PURELY COSMIC SCIENCE. 



15 



gians, always assume, prior to argument, that miraculous narratives are 
legendary. Hence it is that wLen the slowly dying belief in miracles 
finally perishes, it will not be because any one will ever ha ve refuted it by 
an array of syllogisms — the syllogisms of the theologian and those of the 
scientist have no convincing power as against each other, because 
neither accepts the major premise of the other — but it will be because 
the belief is discordant with the mental habits indveed by the general 
study of science. 

" Hence it is that the cosmic philosopher is averse to prosclytism. and 
has no sympathy with radicalism or infidelity. For he knows that the 
theological habits of thought are relatively useful, while scepticism, if 
permanent, is intellectually and morally pernicious; witness the curious 
fact that radicals are prone to adopt retrogade social theories. Knowing 
this, he knows that the only way to destroy theological habits of thought 
without detriment is to nurture scientific habits — which stifle the former 
as surely as clover stifles weeds." 

A more apt illustration would have been, "as sure as the 
weeds stifle the corn." But it is evident from this extract 
that the cosmic philosophers are aware of their inability to 
overthrow Christian theism by any direct proof, or by any 
truth, scientifically verifiable, opposed to it. They trust to 
what in military parlance might be called "a flank move- 
ment." They aim to turn the impregnable position of the 
theist, and defeat him by taking possession of the back 
country from which lie draws his supplies. They would get 
rid of theism by generating mental habits that exclude it, as 
the spirit of the age excludes belief in miracles, in spiritism, 
and the supernatural in any and every form. This is an old 
device. It was attempted in the system of education 
devised for France by the Convention of 1793-94 ; that 
devised the new antichristian calendar ; but it did not prove 
effectual. The Prinze and Princess Gallitzin brought up 
their only son Dmitri after the approved philosophy of the 
day, in profound ignorance of the doctrines and principles 
of religion ; but he became a Christian notwithstanding, a 
priest even, and died a devoted and self-sacrificing mission- 
ary in what were then the wilds of Western Pennsylvania. 
And after a brief saturnalia of atheism and blood, France 
herself returned to her Christian calendar, reopened the 
churches she had closed, and reconsecrated the altars she had 
profaned. 

The belief in miracles may have perished among the Cos- 
mists, but it is still living and vigorous in the minds of men 
who yield nothing, to say the least, in scientific culture and 



16 



"REFUTATION OF ATHEISM 



attainments, to the cosmic philosophers themselves. The- 
belief in a personal devil, who tempts men through their lusts, 
and works in the children of disobedience, lias not perished, 
and is still firmly held by the better educated and the more 
enlightened portion of mankind; and scientific men in no 
sense inferior to Mr. Fiske, Herbert Spencer, or Auguste 
Comte, have investigated the facts alleged by the spiritists — 
not spiritualists, for spiritualists they are not — and found no 
difficulty in recognizing among them facts of a superhuman 
and diabolical origin. The first believers in spiritism we 
ever encountered were persons we had previously known as 
avowed atheists or cosmic philosophers. The men who can 
accept the Cosmic philosophy may deny God, may deny or 
accept any thing, but they should never speak of science. 

That miracles are improbable a priori to the Cosmists 
may be true enough; that they are so to men of genuine 
science is not yet proven. Before they can be pronounced 
improbable or incapable of being proved, it must be proved 
that the supernatural or snpercosmic does not exist; but 
this the Cosmists admit cannot be proved. They own they 
cannot prove that God does not exist, and if he docs exist, 
he is necessarily snpercosmic or supernatural ; and the cos- 
mos itself is a miracle, and a standing miracle, before the 
eyes of all men from the beginning. A miracle is what 
God does by himself im mediately, as the natural is what he 
does mediately, through the agency of second or created 
causes, or does as causa causarum, that is, as causa eminens. 
A miracle, then, is no more improbable than the fact of 
creation, and no more incapable of proof than the existence 
of the cosmos itself. Hume's assertion that no amount of 
testimony is sufficient to prove a miracle, for it is always 
more in accordance with experience to believe the witnesses 
lie, than it is to believe that nature goes out of her way to 
work a miracle, is founded on a total misapprehension of 
what is meant by a miracle. Nature does not work the 
miracle; but God, the author of nature, works it; nor does 
nature in the miracle go out of her way, or deviate from her 
course, ller course and her laws remain unchanged. The 
miracle is the introduction or creation of a new fact by the 
power that creates nature herself, and is as provable by ade- 
quate testimony as is any natural fact whatever. 

The Cosmists should bear in mind that when they rele- 
gate principles and causes, all except the cosmic phenomena 
and the law of their evolution, to the unknowable, the 



NO PURELY COSMIC SCIENCE. 



17 



unknowable is not necessarily non-existent, and should 
remember also that what is unknowable to them may be not 
only knowable but actually known to others. Our own 
ignorance is not a safe rule by which to determine the 
knowledge of others, or the line between the knowable and 
the unknowable. 

" There are more tilings in heaven and earth, Horatio, 
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy." 

For anght the Cosmist can say, there may be in the 
unknowable, principles and causes which render miracles 
not only possible but probable, and the supernatural as rea- 
sonable, to say the least, as the natural. 

Indeed, the cosmic philosophers themselves, when it suits 
their purpose, distinguish between the unknowable and the 
non-existent, and contend that they are not atheists, because, 
though they exile God to the dark region of the unknow- 
able, they do not deny that he exists. They deny what 
they call the " Christian theory of a personal or anthropo- 
morphous God," but not the existence of an infinite Being, 
Power, Force, or Reality, that underlies the cosmic phe- 
nomena, and which appears or is manifested in them. They 
actually assert the existence of such Being, and concede that 
the cosmic phenomena are "unthinkable" without it, though 
it is itself absolutely unknowable. Here is the admission at 
least that the unknowable exists, and that without it there 
would and could be no knowable. 

But the theory they deny is not Christian theism. The 
Christian theist undoubtedly asserts the personality of God, 
but not that God is anthropomorphous. God is not made in 
the image of man, but man is made in the image and like- 
ness of God. Man is not the type of God, but in God is 
the prototype of man; that is to say, man has his type in 
God, in the idea exemplaris in the divine mind, and as the 
idea in the divine mind is nothing else than the essence of 
God, the schoolmen say Dem simUitudo cst rerinn omnium. 
Personality is the last complement of rational nature, or 
sttppositum intelligens. An impersonal God is no God at 
all, for he lacks the complement of his nature, is incomplete, 
and falls into the category of nature. So in denying the 
personality of God, the Cosmists do really deny God, and 
are literally atheists. 

The unknowable Infinite Being, Power, Force, or Ideal- 
ity, the Spencerian philosophers assert, is not God, and they 

Vol. U.— 2 



18 



REFUTATION OF ATHEISM. 



neither call nor regard it as God. In the first place, if 
absolutely unknowable, it is not, in any sense, thinkable, or 
assertable, but must be to our intelligence 1 precisely as if it 
were not. In the next place, if these philosophers mean by 
the unknowable the incomprehensible, not simply the inap- 
prehensible, which we charitably suppose is the fact, they 
still do not escape atheism ; for the power or force they 
assert is not distinct from the cosmos, but is the reality, 
being, or substance of the cosmos, or the real cosmos of 
which the knowable or phenomenal cosmos is the appear- 
ance or manifestation. It is the assertion of nothing super- 
cosmic or independent of the cosmos. Nothing is asserted 
but the real in addition to the phenomenal cosmos. Cer- 
tainly the cosmic philosophers are themselves deplorably 
ignorant of Christian theology, or else they count largely 
on the ignorance of the public they address. Perhaps both 
suppositions are admissible. 

The Cosmists, who present us the latest form of atheism, 
divide all things into knowable and unknowable. The 
unknowable they must concede is at least unknown, and con- 
sequently all their knowledge or science is confined to the 
knowable ; and according to them the knowable is restricted 
to the phenomenal. Hence their science is simply the 
science of the phenomenal, and this is wherefore they assert 
the relativity of all knowledge. But there is no science of 
phenomena alone. Science, strictly taken, is the reduction 
of facts or phenomena to the principle or cause on which 
they depend, and which explains them. Science, properly 
speaking', is the science of principles or causes, as defined 
by Aristotle, and where there are no known causes or prin- 
ciples there is no science. The Cosmists, and even the Posi- 
tivists, place all principles and causes in the unknowable, 
and consequently neither have nor can have any science. 
They therefore have not, and cannot have any scientific 
truth or principle, as we have already shown, to oppose to 
Christian theism. 

The Cosmists restrict all knowledge to the knowledge of 
the cosmic phenomena, and their laws, which are themselves 
phenomenal ; but phenomena are not knowable in them- 
selves, for they do not exist in themselves. Regarded as 
pure phenomena, detached from the being or substance 
which appears in them, they are simply nothing. They are 
cognizable only in the cognition of that which they mani- 
fest, or of which they are appearances. But Ilerbert 



NO PUKELY COSMIC SCIENCE. 



19 



Spencer places that, whatever it is, in the category of the 
unknowable, and consequently denies not only all science, 
but all knowledge of any sort or degree whatever. 

It is a cardinal principle with the Spencerian school that 
all knowledge is relative, that is, knowledge of the relative 
only. But the assumption of the relativity of all knowledge 
is incompatible with the assertion of any knowledge at all. 
Sir William Hamilton indeed maintains the relativity of all 
knowledge, but he had the grace to admit that all philosophy 
ends in nescience. The relativity of knowledge means 
either that we know things not as they really are, a parte rei y 
but only as they exist to us, as affections of our own con- 
sciousness ; or that we know not the reality, but only phe- 
nomena or appearances.* The Cosmists take it in both 
senses ; but chiefly in the latter sense, as they profess to 
follow the objective method as opposed to the subjective. 
In either sense they deny all knowledge. Consciousness is 
the recognition of ourselves as cognitive subject, in the act of 
knowing what is not ourselves, or what is objective. If no 
object is cognized, there is no recognition of ourselves or fact 
of consciousness, and consequently no affection of conscious- 
ness. The soul does not know itself in itself, for it is not 
intelligible in itself: since, as St. Thomas says, it is not 
intelligence in itself, therefore it can know itself only in 
acting; and having only a dependent, not an independent, 
existence, it has need, in order to act, of the counter activity 
of that which is not itself. Hence every thought is a com- 
plex act, including, as will be more fully explained further 
en, simultaneously and inseparably, subject, object, and 
their relation. If no object, then no thought; and if no 
thought then, of course, no knowledge. 

In the second sense, they equally deny all knowledge. 
Phenomena are relative to their being or substance, and are 
knowable only in the intuition of substance or being, and 
relations are cognizable only in the relata, for apart from 
the relata they do not exist, and are nothing. The relative 
is therefore incognizable without the intuition of the abso- 
lute, for without the absolute it is nothing, and nothing is 
not cognizable or cogitable. By placing the absolute, that 



* The relativity of knowledge may also mean, and perhaps is some- 
times taken to mean, that we know things not absolutely in themselves, 
but in their relations. This is true, but it does not make the knowledge 
relative, or knowledge of relations only, for relations are apprehensible 
only in the apprehension of the relata. 



20 REFUTATION OF ATHEISM. 

is, real being or substance, in the unknowable, the Cosmists 
really place the relative or the phenomenal also in the 
unknowable. If, then, we assert the relativity of all knowl- 
edge, and restrict the knowable to the relative and phenom- 
enal, as did Protagoras and other Greek sophists castigated 
by Socrates or Plato, we necessarily deny all knowledge and 
even the possibility of knowledge. 

Plato maintained that the science is not in knowing the 
phenomenal, but in knowing by means of the phenomenal 
the idea, substance, or reality it manifests, or of which it is 
the appearance, or image. He held that the idea is im- 
pressed on matter as the seal on wax, but that the 'science 
consists in knowing, by means of the impression, the idea 
or reality impressed, not in simply knowing the impression 
or phenomenal. Hence he held that all science is per ideam, 
or per imdginem, using the word idea to express alike the 
reality impressed, and the impression or image. He teaches 
that there is science only in l-ising, by means of the image 
impressed on matter — the mimesis in his language, the phe- 
nomenal in the language of our scientists — to the methexis,. 
or participation of the divine idea, or the essence of the 
thing itself, which the phenomenal or the sensible copies, 
mimics, or imitates. Aristotle denies that all knowledge is 
relative, and teaches that all knowledge is per speciem or 
performam, substantially Plato's doctrine, that all knowledge 
is per idea m j but he never held that science consisted in 
knowing the species, whether intelligible or sensible. The 
science consisted in knowing by it the substantial form repre- 
sented, presented, as we should say, by the species to the 
mind. 

Certain it is that there is no knowledge where there is 
nothing known, or where there is nothing to be known. 
The phenomenon is not the thing any more than the image 
is the thing imaged, and apprehension of the image is sci- 
ence only in so far as it serves as a medium of knowing the 
thing it represents. "We know nothing in knowing the sign, 
if we know not that winch it signifies. A sign signifying 
nothing to the mind is nothing, not even a sign. So of phe- 
nomena. They are nothing save in the reality they mani- 
fest, or of which they are the appearances, and if they mani- 
fest or signify nothing to the understanding, they are not 
even appearances. If, then, the reality, the noumenon, a& 
Kant calls it, is relegated to the unknowable, there is no 
phenomenon, manifestation, or appearance in the region of 



NO PUKELY COSMIC SCIENCE. 



the knowable, and consequently nothing knowable, and 
therefore no actual or possible knowledge. 

Either the phenomenal is the appearance or manifestation 
of some real existence, or it is not. If it is, then it is a 
grave mistake to relegate the real being or substance to the 
category of the unknowable ; for what appears, or is mani- 
fest, is neither unknowable nor unknown. If it is not, if 
the cosmic phenomena are the appearance or manifestation 
of no reality, then in knowing them, nothing is known, and 
there is no knowledge at all. 

The Positivists differ from the Cosmists, unless their name 
is ill chosen, in asserting that, as far as it goes, knowledge 
is positive, and not simply relative ; but then they have no 
ground for the unity of science, which they assert, or for the 
coordination of all the sciences under one superior science 
which embraces and unifies them all, and which they profess 
to have discovered, and on which they insist as their pe- 
culiar merit. They reject all metaphysical principles, and 
among them the relation of cause and effect, and then must, 
if consistent, reject genera and species, and regard each 
object apprehended as an independent and self-existent 
being, or as an absolute existence ; that is to say, they must 
assert as many gods as there are distinct objects or unit in- 
dividualities intellectually apprehensible, for no existence 
dependent on another is apprehensible except under the re- 
lation of dependence. The contingent is apprehensible only 
under the relation of contingency, and that relation is ap- 
prehensible only in the apprehension of its correlative ; 
therefore the contingent is not apprehensible without intui- 
tion of the necessary and independent. Things can be pos- 
itively known by themselves alone, only on condition that 
they exist by themselves alone. This, applied to the cosmos, 
would deny in it, or any of its parts, all change, all move- 
ment, all progress of man and society, which the Positivists 
&o strenuously assert. The Positivists, by rejecting the re- 
lation of cause and effect, and all metaphysical relations 
which are real not abstract relations, really deny, as do the 
Cosmists, all real knowledge, for all knowledge, every affir- 
mation, every empirical judgment, presupposes the relation 
of cause and effect. 

The Cosmists are so well aware that there is no science 
of the phenomenal alone, that they abandon their own prin- 
ciples, admit that the relative is unthinkable without the ab- 
solute, and concede that we are compelled, in order to think 



22 



REFUTATION OF ATHEISM. 



the phenomenal, to think an infinite reality on which the 
phenomenal depends. What is thinkable is knowable, and 
therefore they assume that their unknowable is knowable y 
and deny their cardinal principle that all knowledge is rela- 
tive. An extract from another lecture by Mr. Fiske bears 
out this assertion. 

" Upon what grounds did we assert of the Deity that it is unknow- 
able? We were driven to the conclusion that the Deity is unknowable 
because that which exists independently of intelligence and out of rela- 
tion to it, which presents neither likeness, difference, nor relation, cannot 
be cognized. Now, by precisely the same process, we were driven to- 
the conclusion that the cosmos is unknowable only in so far as it is abso- 
lute. It is only as existing independently of our intelligence and out of 
relation to it, that we predicate unknowableness of the cosmos. As man- 
ifested to our intelligence, the cosmos is the universe of phenomena — the 
realm of the knowable. We know stars and planets, we know the sur- 
face of our earth, we know life and mind in their various manifestations, 
individual and social; and while we apply to this vast aggregate of phe- 
nomena the name universe', we can by no mians predicate identity of the 
universe and the Deity. To do so would be to confound phenomena 
with noumena, the relative with the absolute, the knowable with the 
unknowable. It would be. in short, to commit the error of pantheism. 

"But underlying this aggregate of phenomena, to whose extension we 
know no limit in space or time, we are compelled to postulate an absolute 
Reality, a Something whose existence does not depend on the presence 
of a percipient mind — which existed before the genesis of intelligence 
and will continue to exist even though intelligence vanish from the scene. 
In other words, there is a synthesis of phenomena which we know a& 
affections of our consciousness. Instead of regarding these phenomena 
as generated within our consciousness, and referable solely to it for their 
existence, we are compelled to regard them as the manifestations of some 
absolute reality, which, as knowable only through its phenomenal mani- 
festations, is in itself unknowable. This is the whole story; and whether 
we call this absolute reality the Deity or the objective world of noumena, 
seems to me to depend solely upon the attitude, religious or scientific, 
which we assume in dealing with the subject." 

The cosmic philosopher in order to know phenomena, is- 
compelled to postulate an absolute reality as the ground or 
substance of the phenomena, and which is knowable through 
their manifestation ; consequently, to restrict the knowable 
to the phenomenal and relative is only declaring that all 
knowledge is impossible. The Cosmists concede it, and 
therefore make what they declare to be absolutely unknow- 
able, in a certain degree at least, knowable, concede that we 



NO PURELY COSMIC SCIENCE. 



23 



may and do know that it is, and what it is in relation to the 
cosmic phenomena, though not what it is in itself. But 
why are we compelled to postulate the absolute reality, hut 
because the phenomena are not knowable without intuition 
of the reality which they manifest ? or because in appre- 
hending the phenomenal we really have intuition of the 
absolute or the reality manifested ? 

Mr. Fiske, however, even after abandoning the doctrine 
that the absolute or real is unknowable, by no means escapes 
atheism. The absolute reality, Force, or Something which 
he asserts as underlying the aggregate of the cosmic phe- 
nomena, which aggregate of phenomena he calls universe, is 
not God, as he would have us admit, but is merely the cos- 
mic reality of which the cosmic phenomena are the appear- 
ance, and distinguishable from it only as the appearance is 
distinguishable from that which appears. It is, as we have 
already shown, only the real cosmos, the being or substance of 
which the cosmic phenomena are the manifestation. It 
makes the " Deity " it asserts identically the substance of 
the cosmic phenomena, which is either pure pantheism or 
pure atheism, as you call it either God or cosmos, that is, 
nature, since it is indistinguishable from the real cosmos, 
and distinguishable only from the cosmic phenomena. The 
cosmic philosophy does not, then, as it pretends, solve the 
religious problem and reconcile atheism and theism in a 
" igher generalization than either, as Herbert Spencer main- 
tains. 

Herbert Spencer, in his First Principles of a New System 
of Philosophy * says, "that with regard to the origin of the 
universe or cosmos, three verbally intelligible suppositions 
may be made : 1, the universe is self-existent ; 2, the uni- 
verse is self -created ; and 3, the universe is created by an 
external" — or, as we should express it, a supercosmic — 
" agency." He rejects all three as absolutely inconceiv- 
able. If the cosmos is neither self -existent nor self-created, 
nor yet created by an external agency, that is, by a power 
above it and independent of it, it cannot exist at all, and 
Mr. Spencer simply asserts universal nihilism and of course 
universal nescience ; for where nothing is or exists, there 
can be no knowledge or science. Negation is intelligible 
only by virtue of the affirmation it denies. 

The author refutes the first two of the three suppositions con- 



* Part I, No. 11, 2d edition. 



24 



REFUTATION OF ATHEISM. 



clusively enough, and we grant him that the cosmos is neither 
self -existent nor self -created. Then either it does not exist, 
and then no cosmic science ; or it is created by an independ- 
ent, supercosmic agency or power, and then it is contingent, 
and dependent on its cause, or the power that creates it. 
If so, there can be no purely cosmic science ; for the depend- 
ent is not cognizable without intuition of the independent, 
nor the contingent without intuition of the necessary, as we 
shall prove at length, when we come to the positive proofs 
of Christian theism. 

This is sufficient to prove that there is and can be no purely 
cosmic science, even by the confession of the latest atheistic 
school we are acquainted with. It is idle then to pretend to 
controvert Christian theism in the name of science ; for if 
it be denied, all science, all knowledge is denied. The 
Spencerian philosophy is therefore simply elaborated ignor- 
ance, and pure emptiness. 

V. THEOLOGIANS AND THE SCIENTISTS. 

It is not pretended that atheists, Cosmists, or Comtists, 
have, as a matter of fact, no science ; that they have made 
no successful cosmic investigations, or hit upon no impor- 
tant discoveries and inventions in the material or sensible 
order. It is readily admitted that the patient labors and 
unwearied researches and explorations of the scientists, both 
theists and non-theists, in the fields of physical science, 
have enlarged the boundaries of our knowledge, and given 
to man a mastery over the forces of nature on which no 
little of what is called modern civilization depends. What 
is denied is, that the scientists, Comtists, or Cosmists, have 
discovered or attained to any scientitic truth that conflicts 
with Christian theology, and that on their own principles 
they have or can have any science at all. 

The Cosmists and Comtists have senses and intellect as 
well as others ; and there is no reason in the world, while 
they confine themselves to the observation and classification 
of physical facts, and so long as they allow free scope to 
their intellectual faculties and do not attempt to force their 
action to conform to their preconceived theories, why they 
should not arrive at sound inductions. The human mind is 
truer than their theories, and broader than their so-called 
science ; and when suffered to act according to its own laws 
proves its natural object is truth. So long as they confine 



THEOLOGIANS AND SCIENTISTS. 



25 



their investigations within the respective fields of the special 
sciences, and use the natural faculties with which they are 
endowed, they can and often do labor successfully. Laiande 
was a respectable astronomer ; the Mecanique Celeste of 
the atheist, La Place is more than respectable for the mathe- 
matical genius and knowledge it displays ; Alexander von 
Humboldt's Cosmos is an encyclopaedia of physical 
sciences, as they stood in his day ; but in all these and other 
instances the human mind holds intuitively principles which 
transcend the finite and the phenomenal, and without which 
there could have been no science ; but principles which both 
the cosmic and Comtean theories exclude from the realm of 
the knowable. It is not the facts alleged that are objected 
to, but the false theories advanced in explanation of them, 
the conclusions drawn from them, and the application of 
these conclusions to an order that transcends the order to 
which the facts belong, and which, if valid, would exclude 
the facts themselves. 

The atheistic scientists exclude theology and metaphysics 
from the knowable simply because they are too ignorant of 
those sciences to be aware that without the principles which 
they supply there could be no physical science ; or to know 
that in asserting physical science they really assert the very 
principles they theoretically deny. Professor Huxley asserts 
protoplasm as the physical basis of life ; yet he denies that 
there is any cognition or even intuition of the relation of 
cause and effect. How then can he assert any nexus or 
causative relation between protoplasm and life ? He does 
not pretend that protoplasm is life ; he only pretends that 
it is its physical basis. Buc how can it be its physical basis if 
there is between it and life no necessary relation of cause 
and effect? Or if protoplasm is not known to be the prin- 
ciple or basis of life, how can it be known to produce or 
support it ? But principles and relations, we are told, are 
metaphysical, and therefore excluded from the knowable. 
Protoplasm, the professor owns, is dead matter ; how, then 
without a cause of some sort vivifying it, can it become 
living matter ? What is protested against is not the asser- 
tion of protoplasm as the physical or material basis of life, 
— though we believe nothing of the sort, for proteine is as 
imaginary as the plastic soul dreamed of by. Plato ana 
adopted by Cud worth and Gioberti, — but the denial of the 
principle of cause and effect, and then assuming it as the 



•26 



B.ZF FT ATION OF ATHEISM. 



principle of our conclusions, or asserting as scientific, con- 
clnsions which can have no validity without it. 

Professor Huxley follows Hume, who denies that we have 
any knowledge, by experience, of causative force, or tliat 
the antecedent produces the consequence. Dr. Thomas 
Brown, who succeeded Dugald Stewart in the chair of plii- 
losophy in the Edinburgh University, maintains the same, 
and resolves the relation of cause and effect into the relation 
of invariable antecedence and consequence, or simply a 
relation of time. Yet if the antecedent only goes before 
the consequent, without producing or placing it, no conr 
elusion is possible. Induction is reasoning as much as 
deduction, and all reasoning is syllogistic in principle, if 
not in form; and there is no syllogism without a middle 
term, and there is no middle term without the principle of 
cause and effect, which connects necessarily the conclusion 
with the premises, the antecedent with the consequent, as 
cause and effect Deny causality and you deny all reason- 
ing, all logical relations, and can assert no real relation 
between protoplasm, or any thins: else, and life. 

The atheist and Sir William Hamilton exclude the infinite 
from the cognizable and declare it incogitable ; and yet 
either in his geometry will talk of lines that may be infin- 
itely extended, which cannot be done without thinking the 
infinite. If there is no infinitely real, how can there be the 
infinitely possible i If there is no infinite being, there can 
be no infinite ability : if no infinite ability, there is no infi- 
nitely possible, and then no infinitely possible geometrical 
lines. Truly, then, has it been said. ;t an atheist may be a 
geometrician, but if there were no God. there could be no 
geometry.** In mathematics, which is a mixed science, 
there is an ideal and apodictic element on which the empiri- 
cal element depends, and the apodictic is not cogitable 
without intuition of infinite being and its creative act, any 
more than is the empirical itself ; yet both Cosmists and 
Comtists hold mathematics to be a positive science. 

Herbert Spencer asserts the relativity of all knowledge, 
and he, Sir William Hamilton, and Dr. Mansel deny that 
the absolute can be known. But both relative and absolute 
are metaphysical conceptions, and connote one another, and 
neither can be known by itself alone, or without cognition 
or intuition of the other. Other instances might be add need, 
and will be soon, in which the Cosmists use, so to speak, 
principles which they either deny or declare to be unknow- 



THEOLOGIANS AND SCIENTISTS. 



27 



able, and which are really theological or metaphysical prin- 
ciples, and it is by those principles that they are able to 
know any thing at all beyond the intelligence they have in 
common with the beasts that perish. Not heeding these, 
they fall, in the construction of their theories, systematically 
into errors, which when they trust their own minds and fol- 
low their common sense, they avoid as do other men. 

As Cousin somewhere remarks, there may be less in phi- 
losophy than in common sense, in reflection than in intuition, 
but there can never be more. The intuitions, or what Cousin 
calls the primitive or spontaneous beliefs of mankind, are 
the same in all men ; and the differences among men begin 
the moment they begin to reflect on the data furnished by 
intuition, and attempt to explain them, to render an account 
of them to themselves, or, in other words, to philosophize. 
The scientists have the same intuitions, though atheists, that 
other men have, and in the field of the special sciences they 
are equally trustworthy ; it is only when they leave the field 
of the sciences and enter that of philosophy, which with us 
is the name for what is commonly called natural theology, 
and which is the science of principles, that they err. Habit- 
uated to the study of physical facts alone, they overlook or 
deny an order of facts as real, as evident, as certain, as any of 
the physical facts they have observed and classified according 
to their real or supposed physical laws, and even ulterior, and 
without which the physical facts and laws would not and 
could not exist. It is not as scientists they specially err, 
but as philosophers and theologians, that is, in the account 
they render of the origin, principles, and meaning of the 
cosmic facts they observe and classify. 

It is not with science or the cultivation of the sciences that 
philosophers and theologians quarrel, and it is very possible 
that philosophers and theologians have at times been too 
indifferent to the study of physical facts or the cultivation of 
the so-called natural sciences, and have, in consequence, lost 
with the physicists much of the influence they might other- 
wise have retained. Yet it is a great mistake, not to say 
a calumny, to accuse them of holding that the facts of the 
physical order can be determined, a priori, by a knowledge 
of metaphysical or theological principles. The scholastics 
of the middle ages held this no more than did my Lord 
Bacon himself. Observation and induction were as much 
their method as they were his. Bacon invented or discov- 
ered no new method, as is conceded by Lord Maeaulay him- 



28 



"REFUTATION OF ATHEISM. 



self ; all he did was to give an additional impulse to the 
study of material nature, towards which the age in which he 
lived was already turning its attention, as a necessary conse- 
quence of Luther's movement in an untheological direction- 
Yet Bacon maintained strenuously that the method which 
he recommended to be followed in the study of the physical 
sciences is wholly inapplicable to the study of metaphysical 
science or philosophy. His pretended followers have over- 
looked what he had the good sense to say on this point ; 
have assumed that his method is as applicable in the study 
of principles as in the study of facts, and. consequently, 
have made shipwreck of both philosophy and science. The 
result of their error may be seen in Herbert Spencer's 
theory of evolution, which is only the revival of the doc- 
trine of the Greek sophists, refuted by Plato and Aristotle, 
especially by Plato in his Theatetus. 

The quarrel with the scientists is with them, not as scien- 
tists or physicists, but with them as philosophers and the- 
ologians ; and as philosophers and theologians, because they 
give us philosophy or theology only as an induction from 
physicial facts. If their induction were strictly logical it 
could not be accepted, because the physical facts do not in- 
clude all the elements of thought, and, in fact, constitute 
only a part, and that the lowest part, either of the real or 
the knowable. Their theories are too low and too narrow 
for the real, and exclude the more elevated and universal 
intuitions of the race. Induction is drawing a general con- 
elusion from particular facts. To its validity the enumeration 
of particulars must be complete, and it is only by virtue of 
a principal that is universal and necessary that the conclu- 
sion can be drawn, otherwise it is a mere abstraction. The 
induction from physical facts may be perfectly valid in the 
order of physical facts, as applied to the special class of 
physical facts generalized, and yet be of no validity when 
applied beyond that class and to a different order of facts. 
The inductions of the chemist, the mechanic, the electrician, 
may be perfectly just when applied to dead matter, and yet 
be wholly inadmissible when applied to the living subject. 
This is the mistake into which Professor Huxley falls in 
regard to his physical basis of life. His analysis of pro- 
toplasm may be very just, but it is operated on a dead sub- 
ject, and no conclusion from it, applied to the living subject, 
is valid ; for in the living subject it is an element or a fact 
that no chemical analysis can detect, and hence no chemical 



THEOLOGIANS AND SCIENTISTS. 



29 



synthesis can recombine the several components the analysis 
detects so as to reproduce living protoplasm. The induction 
is not valid, for it does not enumerate all the facts, and also 
because it exceeds the order of facts analyzed. So when 
Herbert Spencer tells us in his Biology that " life is the result 
of the mechanical, chemical, and electrical arrangement of the 
particles of matter," he draws a conclusion which goes beyond 
the facts he has analyzed, and assumes it to be valid even 
when applied to a different order of facts. The physiologist 
commits the same error when he infers the qualities of the 
living blood from the analysis of dead blood, — the only blood 
which, from the nature of the case, he can analyze. Hence, 
chemical physiology is far from being scientific, and the 
pathology founded on morbid anatomy, or the dissection of 
the dead subject, is far from being uniformly trustworthy. 

Many theologians fall into an analogous error, and seek 
to infer God by way of induction from the physical facts 
observed in nature, — the very facts from which the atheist 
concludes there is no God. The late Pere Gratry, in his 
Connaissance de Dieu, contends with rare earnestness and 
eloquence that the existence of God is proved by induction. 
Dr. McCosh, resting the whole argument against the atheist 
on marks of design, which is an induction from particular 
facts, does the same. Induction is really only an abstraction 
or generalization, and at best the God obtainable by induc- 
tion can be only a generalization, and God as a generali- 
zation or an abstraction is simply no God at all ; for he 
would be nothing distinct from or independent of the facts 
generalized. Fere Gratry was a mathematician, and arrived 
at God in the same way that the mathematician in the 
calculus arrives at infinitesimals, that is, by eliminating the 
finite. But supposing there is intuition of the finite only, 
the elimination of the finite would give us simply zero, not 
the infinite. 

Then there is another difficulty ; the finite and infinite 
are correlatives, and correlatives connote each other, the one 
cannot be known without the other, nor can either be logi- 
cally inferred from the other. The principle of induction, 
when it means any thing more than classification or abstrac- 
tion, is the relation of cause and effect. But cause and 
etfect, again, are correlatives, — though not, as Sir William 
Hamilton asserts, reciprocal, — and therefore connote each 
other, and cannot be known separately. The argument 
from design, otherwise called the teleological argument or 



30 



■REFUTATION OF ATHEISM. 



argument from the end or final cause, is open to a similar 
objection. The final cause presupposes a first cause, and if 
we know not that there is a first cause, we cannot assert a 
final cause, and therefore are unable to infer design. The 
argument from design has its value when once it is deter- 
mined that the universe has a first cause, or has been created, 
and the question is not as to the existence, but as to the 
attributes of that cause. Till then it simply begs the ques- 
tion. 

The inductions of the physicists within the order of facts 
observed, and when strictly logical, are valid enough, as 
every day proves, by bringing them to the test of experi- 
ment ; but in making them the physicist actually avails him- 
self of the principle or the relation of cause and effect, 
which lie is able to do, because, as a matter of fact, he holds 
it from intuition represented by language, though it is only 
the metaphysician or philosopher that takes note of it, or is 
able to verify it. The inductions of the Cosmists drawn 
professedly from physical facts alone, are invalid on their 
own principles, because the Cosmists reject, at least as cog- 
nizable, the relation of cause and effect, the principle of all 
induction or synthetic reasoning ; and are invalid also on 
any principle when opposed to the metaphysician or theolo- 
gian, because they are drawn from physical facts alone, and 
do not include the facts of the intelligible and moral order, 
in which are the principle and cause of the physical facts 
themselves. 

This is still more the case, when we add to philosophy or 
natural theology, the supernatural order, made known to us 
by supernatural revelation. The Cosmists recognize and 
study only the facts, or phenomena as they improperly call 
them, of the physical universe, and from these only physical 
inductions are possible. They have only a physical world, 
and their reasonings and conclusions, even when true within 
that world, are inapplicable to any thing beyond and above 
it, and therefore can never prove any thing against theology, 
natural or supernatural, and on their own principles, as we 
have seen, their inductions are of no value beyond the limits 
of the physical world itself. They err in taking a part of 
the real or a part of the knowable for the whole. They 
may say that they do not deny the reality of what they call 
the unknowable, that is, being, principles, causes, &c. ; but 
they have no right to say that all that transcends the order 
of physical facts and their laws, the special subject of their 



THEOLOGIANS AND SCIENTISTS. 



31 



study, is unknowable. It may be unknown to them, but it 
may be both knowable and known to others. Also, by not 
knowing what lies beyond the range of their own studies, 
they may and do give a false account of their own science. 
This is, in fact, really the case with them. Many of their 
inductions are valid in the physical order, as experiment 
proves ; but without the intuition of the metaphysical rela- 
tion of cause and effect the mind could make no induction, 
consequently they are wrong, and the very truth of their 
inductions proves that they are wrong, in declaring that the 
relation pertains to the unknowable. 

The Cosmists do not err chiefly as physicists, but as phi- 
losophers and theologians, and as long as they are contented 
to be scientists and report simply the result of their scien- 
tific researches and explorations there can be no quarrel with 
them on the part either of theologians or philosophers ; but 
the quarrel, as has been shown, begins when they attempt to 
theorize, or to construct with their physical facts alone a 
cosmic philosophy, and to say it cannot embrace, because no 
philosophy based on physical facts alone can embrace, the 
principle of all the real and all the knowable, since the 
physical is neither the whole nor the principle of the whole ; 
nor is it commensurate with the reality presented intuitively 
to every mind. 

Undoubtedly, neither the philosophy nor the theology can 
be true that contradicts any physical fact, if fact it be, but 
no explanation or theory of physical facts is admissible that 
contradicts or denies any metaphysical or theological prin- 
ciple. 

There are no physical facts that contradict or in the slight- 
est degree impugn Christian theism, as we hope to show in 
this or a future essay. In point of fact, atheists, pantheists, 
Cosmists, or Positivists, do not oppose or pretend to oppose 
any facts to what they call "the theistical hypothesis," they 
only oppose to it their inductions, their theories and hypoth- 
eses, or their explanation of the class of facts that have 
come under their observation. These, we have seen, are 
untenable, for without the principles they are intended to 
deny they cannot even be constructed. Now, theories that 
contradict their own principle can make nothing against 
Christian theism, cannot disprove it, or cause in any mind 
that understands the question, the slightest doubt of it, and 
the theist has a perfect right to treat them with sovereign 
contempt. At least, they assign no reason why Christian 



32 



^REFUTATION OF ATHEISM. 



theism should be ousted from its possession. They cannot 
overcome the argument from prescription, and place Chris- 
tian theism on its defence, or compel it to produce its title- 
deeds. 

Here our refutation of atheism properly ends, and no 
more need be said ; but while we deny that we are bound 
to do any thing more, we are disposed to produce our title- 
deeds and prove positively, by unanswerable arguments, the 
falsity of atheism, or to demonstrate, as fully as logic can 
demonstrate, Christian theism. 

VI. INCONCLUSIVE PKOOFS. 

Philosophers and theologians do not necessarily adduce 
the best possible arguments to prove their theses, and may 
sometimes use very weak and even inconclusive arguments. 
An argument for the existence of God may also seem to one 
mind conclusive, and the reverse to another. Men usually 
argue from their own point of view, and take as ultimate 
the principles which they have never doubted, or heard 
questioned, although far from being in reality ultimate, and 
thus take for granted what for others needs to be proved. 
Men also may hold the truth, be as well assured of it as they 
are of their own existence, even possess great good sense and 
sound judgment, and yet be very unskilful in defending it, 
— utterly unable to assign good and valid reasons for it. 
They know they are right, but know not how to prove it. 

St. Thomas, the Doctor Angelicus, maintains" that the 
existence of God is demonstrable, not from principles really a 
priori or universal, — for nothingcan be moreuni versal or more 
ultimate than God from which his existence can be concluded, 
since he is the first principle alike in being and in knowing, 
— but as the cause from the effect; and this he proves by 
five different arguments : The first is drawn from the empi- 
rical fact of motion and the necessity of a first mover, not 
itself movable ; the second is drawn from the empirical fact 
of particular efficient causes and the necessity of a first effi- 
cient cause, itself uncaused ; the third is taken from the 
fact that some things are possible and some are not, and as 
all things cannot be merely possible, therefore there must 
be something which is se, necessary, and in acta. The- 



* Sum. tkeol., part I, quaest. 1, art. 2 et 3. 



INCONCLUSIVE PROOFS. 



33 



fourth proof is drawn from the fact that there are different 
degrees in things, some being more and others less good, 
true, noble, perfect, and therefore demand the perfect alike 
in the order of the true and the good, — a being in whom all 
diversities are identitied and all degrees are included, and 
which is their source and complement. The fifth is drawn 
from the fact of order and government, and the necessity of 
a supreme governor. These all conclude God, if we may so 
speak, from a fact of sensible experience, and are empirical 
proofs. 

Dr. McCosh, president of Princeton College, New Jersey,, 
a man of no mean philosophical repute, relies wholly on the 
principle of cause and effect, as does St. Thomas, and dis- 
misses all arguments but Paley's argument, or the argument 
from design. Pere Gratry (now dead), of the New Oratory, 
relies, in his Connaissance de Dieu, on induction from; 
intellectual and ethical facts; the late Dr. Potter, Episcopa- 
lian bishop of Pennsylvania, in his Philosophy of Relig- 
ion, does virtually the same. A writer in the British 
Quarterly Review for July, 1871, in a very able article on 
Theism, examines and rejects all the arguments usually 
adduced to prove that God is, except that drawn from intu- 
ition, or, as we understand him, that which asserts the direct 
and immediate empirical intuition of God, or the Divine 
Being. Dr. 1 lodge, an eminent Presbyterian divine, in his 
Systematic Theology, accepts all the arguments usually 
adduced, some as proving one thing, and others as prov- 
ing another pertaining to theism, and holds that no one 
argument alone suffices to prove the whole. Dr. John 
Henry Newman, in his Apologia pro Vita sua, says he 
has never been able to prove to his own satisfaction the 
existence of God by reason ; he can only prove it is- 
probable that there is a God, and appears to have writ- 
ten his Grammar of Assent to prove that probability 
is enough for all practical purposes, since we are obliged 
in nearly all the ordinary affairs of life to act on probabilities 
alone. Ilis belief in Ged he seems to derive from conscience. 
The Holy See has decided against the Traditionalists that 
the existence of God can be proved with certainty by rea- 
soning prior to faith, and the Holy See has also improbated 
the doctrine of the Lou vain professors, that we have imme- 
diate cognition of God, — a doctrine improbated by reason 
itself; for if man had immediate cognition of God, no 
proofs of his existence would be necessary, since no man 

Vol. II. -3 



34 



"REFUTATION OF ATHEISM. 



could doubt his existence any more than his own, or than 
that the sun shines at noonday in the heavens when his eyes 
behold it. 

The general tendency in our day is to conclude the cause 
from the effect, and to conclude God as designer, from the 
marks of design, or the adaptation of means to ends discov- 
erable, or assumed -to be discoverable, in ourselves and the 
external world. The objection to all arguments of this sort, 
that is to say, to all psychological, cosmological, and teleo- 
logical arguments, which depend on the principle of cause 
and effect, is, that they all beg the question, or take for 
granted what requires to be proved. They all assume that 
the soul and cosmos are effects. Grant them to be effects, 
it follows necessarily that they have had a cause, and a cause 
adequate to the effect. As to that there can be no doubt. 
Cause and effect are correlatives, and correlatives connote 
one another, and neither is knowable alone. When we 
know any thing is an effect, we know it has a cause, whether 
we know what that cause is or not. But how prove that the 
sonl or the cosmos is an effect? This the atheist denies, and 
this is the point to be proved against him, and how is it to 
be proved from the facts of experience? 

St. Thomas assumes, in his second proof, that we have 
experience of particular efficient causes. This is denied by 
Hume, Kant, Dr. Thomas Brown, Sir William Hamilton, 
Dr. Hansel, and by all the Cointists, Cosmists, and atheists 
of every species. Even Dr. Reid, the founder of the Scot- 
tish school, denies that we know by experience any power 
in the so-called cause that produces the effect, but contends 
that we arc obliged, by the very constitution of our nature 
or of the human mind, to believe it. Kant agrees with 
Eeid, and makes the irresistible belief a form of the under- 
standing. Huxle} T avowedly follows Hume, as do the great 
body of non-Christian scientists. Dr. Brown says that all 
we know of cause and effect is invariable antecedence and 
consequence, and maintains that, so far as experience goes, 
the relation of cause and effect is a relation of invariable 
sequence, — simply a relation in the order of time. The 
question does not stand where it did when St. Thomas wrote, 
and to meet the speculations of the day we are obliged to go 
behind him, and establish principles which he could take 
for granted, or dismiss as inserted in human nature itself, 
that rs, as we say, intuitively given. 

Even if experience could prove particular effects, and 



INCONCLUSIVE PROOFS. 



35 



therefore particular and contingent efficient causes, we could 
not conclude from them universal and necessary causes, or 
the one universal cause, for the universal cannot be logically 
concluded from the particular, and the God that could be 
concluded would be only a generalization or abstraction, and 
no real God at all. Or if this is denied, which it cannot 
well be, God could be concluded only under the relation of 
cause, as causa causarum, if you please, but still only as effi- 
cient cause, and therefore only as essentially cause, and sub- 
stance or being only in that lie is cause. This supposes him 
necessarily a cause, and obliged to cause in order to be or 
exist. This would make creation necessary, and God obliged 
from the intrinsic necessity of his own nature to create, — 
the error of Cousin, our old master, to whom we owe the best 
part of our philosophical discipline. But this is only one of 
the many forms of pantheism, itself only a form of atheism. 

Dr. McCosh rests the whole question on the marks of 
design in man and the cosmos. Design and designer are 
correlatives, and connote each other; and consequently the 
one cannot be proved as the condition of proving the other: 
for the proof of the one is ipso facto the proof of both. 
Prove design and you prove, of course, a designer. But 
how prove design, if you know not as yet that the world 
lias been made or created? The most you can do is to prove 
that there are in nature things analogous to what in the 
works of man are the product of art or design ; but analogy 
is not identity, and how do you prove that what you call 
design is not nature, or natura naturansf Does the bee 
construct its cell, the beaver its dam, or the swallow her nest 
by intelligent design, as man builds his house? or by instinct, 
the simple force of nature ? Paley's illustration of the watch 
found by the 'traveller in a desert place is illusory: for the 
Indian who saw a watch for the first time took it to be a 
living thing, not a piece of mechanism or art. 

But even granting the marks of design are proved, all that 
can be concluded, is not a supercosmic God or Creator, but 
simply that the world is ordered and governed by an intelli- 
gent mind ; it does not necessarily carry us beyond the 
Anima mundi of Aristotle, or the Supreme Artificer of 
Plato, operating with preexisting materials and doing the 
best he can with them. They do not authorize us to con- 
clude the really snpramundane God, by the sole energy of 
his word creating the heavens and the earth and all tilings 
therein from nothing, as asserted by Christian theism. They 



36 



REFUTATION OF ATHEISM 



can be explained as well by supposing the causa immanens 
with Spinoza, as by supposing a causa eificiens. 

The cosmologists undertake to conclude the existence of 
God from the facts or phenomena of the universe. The 
universe is contingent, dependent, insufficient for itself, and 
therefore it must have had a creator and upholder, who is- 
himself necessary, not contingent, and is independent, self- 
subsisting, self-sufficing. Nothing more true. But whence 
learn we that the universe is contingent, dependent, and 
insufficient for itself ? We know not this fact by experience 
or empirical intuition. Besides, necessary and contingent 
are correlatives, and there is no intuition of the one without 
intuition of the other. 

The psychologists profess to conclude God by way of 
induction from the facts of the soul. Thus Descartes says, 
Coyito) ergo sum, and professes to deduce, after the manner 
of the geometricians, God and the universe from his own 
undeniable personal existence. Certainly, if God were not, 
Descartes could not exist, but from the soul alone, only the 
soul can be deduced, and from purely psychological facts 
induction can give us only psychological generalizations or 
laws. Take the several facts, attributes, or perfections of 
the soul, and suppose them carried up to infinity, it would 
still be only a generalization, for their substance would still 
be the soul, distinct and different by nature from the divine 
substance or being. God is not man completed ; nor is man, 
as Gioberti says, "an incipient God, or God who begins." 
Man is indeed made in the image and likeness of God, not 
God in the image and likeness of man. lie is not anthro- 
pomorphous ; though his likeness in which we are created 
enables us to understand, by way of analogy, something of 
his infinite attributes, and to hold, when not prevented by 
sin and when elevated by grace, a more or less intimate 
communion with him. Christianity, indeed, teaches that 
man is destined to union with God as his beatitude, but the 
human personality remains ever distinct from the divine. 

We are not certain in what sense Bere Gratry understands 
induction. Probably our inability arises from our compara- 
tive ignorance of mathematics, lie says the soul by induc- 
tion darts at once to God and seizes him, so to speak, by 
intelligence and love, whatever all that may mean. We can 
understand the than of the soul to God whom it knows and 
loves, but we cannot understand how a soul ignorant of God 
can, by an interior and sudden spring, jump to a knowledge 



INCONCLUSIVE PKOOFS. 



37 



of him. Pere Gratry says the soul arrives at the knowledge 
of God as the mathematician in the calculus arrives at infini- 
tesimals, namely, by eliminating the finite. Eliminate the 
finite, he says, and you have the infinite. Not at all, mon 
Pore. Eliminate the finite, and you have, as we have already 
said, simply zero. The infinite is not the negation of the 
finite. Infinitesimals again, are nothing, for there is and 
can be no infinitely little. The error comes right in the 
end, so far as mathematics is concerned, for it is equal on 
both sides, and the error on one side neutralizes the error 
on the other side. 

The late Dr. Potter, Protestant bishop of Pennsylvania, 
relies on induction, and chiefly on induction from the ethical 
facts of the soul. But the ethical* argument to prove the 
existence of God does not avail, for, till his existence is 
proved, there is no basis for ethics. The soul has a capacity 
to receive and obey a moral, law, but that law is not founded 
in its nature or imposed by it. The moral law proceeds 
from God as final cause of creation, as the physical laws 
proceed from him as first cause, and is the law of our per- 
fection, necessary to be obeyed in order to fulfil our des- 
tiny, or to obtain our supreme good or beatitude. If there 
is no God, there is and can be no moral law, and then no 
morality. Till you know God is, and is the final cause of 
the universe, you cannot call any facts of the soul ethical. 

The argument of St. Anselm in his Monologium is the 
fourth of St. Thomas, and concludes God as the perfect 
from the imperfect, of which we are conscious, or which we 
know by experience in ourselves, or as the complement 
of man, an argument which contains a germ of truth, but 
errs by overlooking the fact that the perfect and imperfect 
are correlatives, and that the one cannot be inferred from the 
other because the one is not cognizable or cogitable without 
the other. St. Anselm himself seems not to have been 
satisfied with the argument of his Monologium, and gave 
subsequently in his Prosiogium, what he regarded as a 
briefer and more conclusive argument. We have in our 
minds the idea of the most perfect being, a greater than which 
cannot be thought. But greater is a being in re, than a 
being in inteUectu. If then there is not in re a most per- 
fect being, than which a greater cannot be thought or con- 
ceived, then we can think a greater and more perfect being 
than we can, which is a contradiction. Therefore the most 
perfect being, a greater than which cannot be thought, does 



38 



REFUTATION OF ATHEISM. 



and must exist in re, as well as in intellect^ since we cer- 
tainly have the idea in our minds. 

Tli is argument would be conclusive if it were shown that 
the idea is objective and an intuition, as we shall endeavor, 
further on, to prove that it is. Leibnitz somewhere remarks* 
that it would be conclusive, if it were first proved that God 
is possible, which shows that Leibnitz, with his universal 
genius and erudition, could be as weak as ordinary mortals. 
It was his weakness, in which he anticipated Hegel, to place 
the possible prior to and independent of the real. If we 
could suppose God not to exist in actu, we could not sup- 
pose him to be possible; for possibility cannot actualize 
itself and there would be no real to reduce it to act. The 
error of Hegel is in supposing the possible, for his reine 
Seyn is merely possible being, precedes das Wesen, or the 
real, and has in itself the tendency or aptness to become 
real — das Wesen — the old Gnostic doctrine that makes all 
things originate in the Byssus or Void. 

There is no possible without the real, for possibility is the 
ability of the real. The possible in relation to God is what 
God is able to do, and in relation to man is what man is able to- 
do with the faculties God has given him. There is nothing, 
we may add on which philosophers have, it seems to us, been 
more puzzled, or more bewildered others, than on this very 
question of possibility. If there were no actual, there would 
and could be no possible, for possibility, prescinded from the 
reality of the actual, is simply nothing. The excellent Father 
Tongiorgi imagines that possibility is not nothing, but even 
something prescinded from the ability of the actual, and 
indeed something which, like the fatum of the Stoics, limits or 
binds the power of God himself. Some things he holds are 
possible, and others are impossible, even to God. He forgets- 
that nothing is impossible to God but to contradict, that is, 
annihilate his own eternal and necessary being. He is his 
own possibility, and the measure of the possible. It is his- 
being that founds the nature of things, about which philos- 
ophers talk so much. 

As to the argument of the Proslogium, its validity 
depends on the sense in which the word idea is taken. If 
we take it in a psychological sense, as a mere mental concep- 
tion, the argument may be a logical puzzle, but concludes- 
nothing. 

If we suppose idea can exist in intellectu without existing 
in re, the argument concludes at best only a psychological 



INCONCLUSIVE PROOFS. 



39 



abstraction ; but if we suppose the mental idea to be the 
intuition of the real and objective, as we have just said, it 
is valid and conclusive. St. Anselm seems to us to take idea 
in a subjective sense and to conclude the objective from the 
subjective ; if so, his argument is pyschological, and, like 
all psj^chological arguments, inconclusive. Yet he seems to 
maintain that it is also objective, and that it could not exist 
in mente, if it did not exist in re, and therefore conclusive. 

Descartes deduces the existence of God from the soul, in 
which the idea of God he holds, is innate. But what is 
innate, that is, born in the soul and with it, is the soul, or at 
least psychical ; consequently, the argument is psychological, 
and proves nothing. Besides, Descartes, as is not seldom 
the case with him, falls into a paralogism, and reasons in a 
vicious circle; he takes the idea in intellectit to prove that 
God is, and the veracity of God to prove the objective 
truth of the idea. He also tells us, elsewhere, when hard 
pressed by his opponents, that he means by the innate idea 
of God only that the soul has the innate faculty of thinking 
God, and therefore concludes God is because man thinks 
him ; but this is only asserting, in other words, that the soul 
has the faculty of knowing God by immediate cognition — ! 
recently im probated by the Holy See — and rests on the 
principle that thought can never be erroneous, which is not 
true, otherwise every man would be infallible, incapable of 
error. 

The ontological arguments, so-called, founded on the 
alleged immediate cognition of being, are in nearly all cases, 
not ontological, but really psychological, as dan reine Seyn of 
Hegel, which is simply an abstraction, therefore worthless; 
for the soul has no power in itself alone of immediately ap- 
prehending being. The psychological arguments are all in- 
conclusive because they all assume the point to be proved. 
Yet it is not denied that the argument from design, and 
others that rest on the principle of cause and effect, as well 
as those drawn from the ethical wants and aspirations of the 
» soul, are all valuable, not indeed in proving that God is, but 

in proving what he is. St. Paul tells us that " the invisible 
things of God, even his eternal power and divinity, are 
clearly seen from the beginning of the world, being under- 
stood by the things that are made," Rom. i. 20, but the 
Apostle does not tell us that the existence of God is a logi- 
cal conclusion from cosmological or psychological facts or 
from "the things that are made." Indeed, St. Thomas cites 



40 



REFUTATION OF ATHEISM. 



this text to prove what God is, rather than to prove that he 
is, for he throughout is replying to the question Quid est 
Deus, rather than to the question, An sit Deus, as may be 
seen by referring to the lirst article of the question cited 
above, in which he answers the question, Utrum Deum esse 
■sit per se notum. 

The great question the Apostles and the Fathers had to 
argue against the Gentiles was not precisely the existence 
of God, but that of the Divine Unity and the fact of cre- 
ation and providence. In fact, the distinguishing and es- 
sential feature of the Mosaic doctrine was less that God is 
one than that God is the one Almighty Creator of all things. 
The existence of one God, as has been seen, was not denied 
by the Gentiles, except by a few philosophers. The mother 
error of Gentilism was the loss of the tradition of creation, 
which paved the way for divinizing the forces of nature, 
and at length for the worship of demons, always held inferior 
to a Supreme Divinity, of which some dim reminiscence 
was always retained. 

VII. ANALYSIS OF THOUGHT. 

Atheism is not natural to mankind, and is always, where- 
€ver found, the fruit of a false or defective philosophy and 
erroneous theories mistaken for science. The philosophy 
which has been generally cultivated since Descartes made 
his attempt to divorce philosophy from theology, of which 
it is simply the rational element, and to erect it into a sepa- 
rate and independent science, complete in itself, and embrac- 
ing the entire natural order, has hardly recognized and set 
forth with much clearness or distinctness the principles of a 
conclusive demonstration of theism, or a scientific refutation 
of atheism. If there is atheism pretending to found itself 
on science, we may charge it to the false philosophy which 
has generally obtained, except when connected with Catholic 
theology, and kept from going astray by tradition and com- 
mon sense. From the philosophers and false scientists 
atheism has descended to the people through popular liter- 
ature, and diffused itself among the half-learned, chiefly by 
modern lectures and journalism, till literature, art, science, 
ethics, and especially politics, have become infected, and 
the very air we breathe saturated with it. 

In order to refute atheism and to check the atheistic tend- 
ency of modern society, it is necessary to revise the generally 



ANALYSIS OF THOUGHT. 



41 



received philosophy, to correct its faulty principles and 
method, to supply its defects, to harmonize it with common 
sense and the traditions of the race, and to establish, what it 
is far from doing, the identity of the principles of science 
and the principles of things, or the identity of the knowable 
and the real, that is, to show that the order of science follows 
the order of being, and in their principles they are identical. 
To do this in a manner as intelligible as possible to the gen- 
eral reader, it is necessary to set forth the real principles on 
which philosophy is founded. Philosoph} 7 itself is the 
science of principles, and the principles must be real, that 
is, the principles of things, not simply mental conceptions 
or concepts, or the science will want reality and be no 
science at all. Real principles are the principles, not of 
science alone, without which nothing can be known, but 
principles of things, on which all things depend, and without 
which nothing is or exists. 

Obviously then the principles of philosophy and of reality 
are a priori, and precede both the science and the reality 
that depends on them, or of which they are the principles. 
They must, then, be given, and neither created nor obtained 
by the mind's own activity, for without them the mind can 
neither operate nor even exist. The great error of the 
dominant philosophy of our times is in the assumption that 
the mind starts without principles, and finds them or obtains 
them by its own activity or its own painful exertions. Hence 
it places method before principles, which is no less absurd 
than to suppose that the mind, the soul, generates or creates 
itself. Principles are given, not found by the mind oper- 
ating without principles. They are given in the fact which 
we call thought, and we ascertain what they are only by a 
diligent and careful analysis of thought. 

In order to correct the errors of the prevailing philoso- 
phy, to ascertain the principles of a true philosophy, and of 
real science that refutes the atheist by demonstrating that 
God is, and is the creator of the heavens and the earth and 
all things visible and invisible, we must begin, as Descartes 
did, with thought (cogito), who was so far right, and ascer- 
tain what are the real and necessary elements of thought. 
This is no light labor, and it is a labor rendered necessary 
only by prevailing errors in order to refute them, otherwise 
there would be no necessity for it, and little utility in it; 
for the human mind remains and operates the same with or 
without the knowledge the analysis affords. 



42 



REFUTATION OF ATHEISM. 



We therefore adopt the method of the psychologists so 
far as to begin with the analysis of thought. This is imposed 
on us by the necessity of the case, as it is only in thought 
that we find ourselves or are placed in intellectual relation 
with any thing not ourselves. It is only in thought that the 
principles either of science or reality can be ascertained. 
The atheist must assert thought as well as the theist, and so 
also must the sceptic ; for he who denies or he who doubts, 
thinks, and can neither doubt nor deny without thinking. 
Hence universal denial or universal doubt, or scepticism, is 
simply impossible ; for he who denies, or he who doubts, 
knows that he denies or doubts, as he who thinks knows that 
he thinks. The error of Descartes, or the Psychologies, is 
not in beginning with thought, but in their assumption that 
all thought is the act of the soul or subject alone, or that 
thought is a purely psychological fact. 

Cousin, though erring on many capital points, gives some- 
where a very clear and just analysis of thought, which he 
defines to be a complex fact, composed of three inseparable 
elements, subject, object, and form. He asserts that the 
subject is always the soul, or ourselves thinking ; the object 
is always distinct from the soul, and standing over against 
it ; and the form is always the relation of the subject and 
object. Every thought, therefore, is the synthesis of three 
elements : subject, object, and their relation, as we main- 
tained and proved in some chapters of an unfinished work 
on Synthetic Philosophy published in the years 1S42-43. 

Thought is either intuitive or reflective. The careful 
analysis of intuitive thought, intuition, what Cousin calls 
spontaneity or spontaneous thought, though erroneously, 
and which he very properly distinguishes from reflection or 
thought returning on itself, and so to speak, actively rethink- 
ing itself, discloses these three elements : subject, object, and 
their relation, always distinct, always inseparable, given 
simultaneously in one and the same complex fact. Deny 
one or another of these elements and there is and can be no 
thought. Remove the subject, and there is no thought, for 
there evidently can be no thought where there is no thinker ; 
remove the object, and there is equally no thought, for to 
think nothing is simply not to think ; and finally, deny the 
relation of subject and object, and you also deny all thought, 
for certainly the soul cannot apprehend an object or an object 
be presented to the soul with no relation between them ; 
hence the assertion by the peripatetics of the necessity to 



ANALYSIS OF THOUGHT. 



43 



the fact of intuition as well as of cognition of what they call 
phantasmata and species intelltgibiles, which is simply their 
way of expressing the relation in thought of subject and 
object. 

The three elements of thought being given simultaneously 
and synthetically in one and the same fact, they all three 
rest on the same authority and are equally certain both sub- 
jectively and objectively. Here we escape the interminable 
debates of philosophers as to the passage from the subject- 
ive to the objective, and, in military phrase, flank the ques- 
tion of the certainty of human knowledge, and thus render 
all arguments against either subjectivism or scepticism super- 
fluous. There is no passage from the subjective to the 
objective, if the activity of the subject alone suffices for the 
production of thought, and no possible means of a logical 
refutation of scepticism. If the soul alone could suffice for 
thought, nothing else would be necessary to its production, 
and thought would and could affirm no reality beyond the 
soul itself ; no objective reality could ever be proved, and 
no real science would be possible. All objective certainty 
would vanish, for we have and can have cm\y thought with 
which to prove the objective validity of thought. Hence it 
is that those philosophers who regard thought as the product 
of the soul's .activity alone, have never been able to refute 
the sceptic or to get beyond the sphere of the subject. 

The soul's activity alone does not, and, unless it were 
God, who is the adequate object of his own intellect, could 
not, suffice for thought. The object is as necessary to the 
production of thought as is the subject. The soul cannot 
act without it, and therefore cannot seek and find its object. 
The presence and activity of the object is necessary to the 
activity of the subject. The object must then present itself 
or be presented to the soul, or there is no thought actual or 
possible. This is the fact which Cousin undertakes to 
explain by what he calls spontaneity, and which he distin- 
guishes from reflection. Intuition, he says, is spontaneous, 
impersonal ; but reflection is personal, in which the soul acts 
voluntarily. But unhappily he loses all the advantage of 
this distinction, for he makes the intuition the product of 
the spontaneous activity of the soul, or, as he says, the spon- 
taneous or impersonal reason, therefore as much a psychical 
product as reflection itself ; and therefore again, gets, even 
in intuition, no object, no reality, extra animam, and with 
all his endeavors he never really gets out of the subjectivism 



44 



REFUTATION OF ATHEISM. 



of Kant, or even trie egoism of Fichte. The distinction he 
makes between the personal reason and the impersonal is bj 
no means a distinction between subject and object, but 
simply a distinction in the soul itself, or a distinction 
between its spontaneous and reflective modes of acting, and 
is, as Pierre Leroux has well said, a contradiction of his own 
assertion that the subject is always the soul, and the object 
is always distinguishable from it, standing over against it, 
and acting from the opposite direction ; for the impersonal 
and personal reason are in his view psychical, simply a 
faculty of the soul. 

If the object were purely passive, or did not actively con- 
cur in the production of thought, it would be as if it were 
not, and the soul could no more think with it than without 
it. It is the fact that the object actively concurs in the pro- 
duction of thought that establishes its reality, since what is 
not, or has no real existence, cannot act, cannot present or 
affirm itself. So far Pierre Leroux, to whom we are much 
indebted for this analysis of thought, is right, and proves 
liimself, let Gioberti speak as contemptuously of him as he 
will, a true philosophical observer; but he vitiates all that 
follows in his philosophy by maintaining that the soul creates 
or supplies the form of the thought, or the relation between 
subject and object, as we have shown in The Convert. The 
soul cannot act without the object, nor unless the object is 
placed in relation with it ; consequently the soul can no 
more create the relation than it can create the object or 
itself. The object with the relation, or the correlation of 
subject and ob ject, then, is presented to the soul or given it, 
not created or furnished by it. 

The soul, unable to think by itself alone, or in and of 
itself, can think even itself, find itself, or become aware of 
its own existence only in conjunction with the object intui- 
tively presented ; each of the three elements of thought 
therefore not only rests on the same authority, but each is 
as certain as is the fact of consciousness or the fact that we 
think. The object is affirmed or affirms itself objectively, 
and is real with all the certainty we have or can have of our 
own existence. Further than this, thought itself cannot go. 
we cannot from principles more ultimate than thought, demon- 
strate thought ; but it is not necessaiy, for he who thinks 
knows that he thinks, and cannot deny that he thinks with- 
out thinking, and therefore not without affirming what he 



ANALYSIS OF THOUGHT. 



4& 



denies. This is all that can be asked, for a denial that 
denies itself is equivalent to an affirmation. 

This analysis of thought not only refutes scepticism and 
subjectivism, or what is called in English philosophy, ideal- 
ism, and shows the objective validity of intuition to be as- 
indisputable as our consciousness of our own existence, but 
it refutes at the same time and by the same blow both the 
ontologists and psychologists ; not indeed by denying either 
the ontological or the psychological principle, but by show- 
ing that both are given in one and the same thought, and 
therefore that neither is obtained by any process of reason- 
ing from the other. The psychologist assumes that the soul 
is given, and that it by its own psychical action obtains the 
non-psychical or ontological ; the ontologist assumes that 
being is given, and from the notion of being alone the soul 
deduces both the psychical and the cosmic. Neither is the 
fact. Being must be intuitively presented or we cannot 
have the notion of being, and the intuitive presentation of 
being to the subject gives the subject simultaneously the 
consciousness of itself as the subject of the intuition. 
Being can be presented in thought, only under the relation 
of object, and in every thought is given simultaneously 
with the other two inseparable elements, subject and rela- 
tion. The psychologist fails in his analysis of thought to 
detect as an original and indestructible element of thought a 
non-psychical element, the object which stands over against 
it, distinct from it, and except in conjunction with which 
there is and can be no psychical activity or action. What 
the psychologist overlooks is the fact that the psychical and 
the non-psychical, as the condition of the soul's activity and 
consciousness of itself, are both given together in one and 
the same intuitive fact, and therefore that neither is obtained 
as an clement of thought or science from the other. The 
objective validity of our knowledge resrs on the non-psychi- 
cal element of thought, not on the psychical. The ontolo- 
gist fails to detect the psychical element as a primitive ele- 
ment of thought ; the psychologist fails to detect the onto- 
logical element as equally primitive and unclerived ; and 
neither notes the fact that both are given in one and the 
same original intuition. Cousin asserts it indeed, but as we 
have seen, forgets it or destroys its value, by resolving the 
distinction of subject and object into a distinction between 
the personal and impersonal reason, or between the spon- 
taneous and reflective modes of the soul's activity, which 



46 



REFUTATION OF ATHEISM. 



makes both really psychical, and allows nothing extra ani- 
mam to be affirmed in thought or presented in intuition. 



VEH. ANALYSIS OF THE OBJECT. 

The analysis of thought, as we have just seen, discloses a 
non-psychical or an ontological element, and shows that in 
every thought there is an object distinct from and independ- 
ent of the subject, and thai in every intuitive thought the 
object affirms or presents itself by its own activity. This at 
one stroke establishes the reality of the object and the valid- 
ity of our science or knowledge. Having done this, we may 
proceed to analyze, not the subject, as do the psychologists, 
but the object, in order to determine, not how we know, but 
what we know. 

Modern philosophers, for the most part, especially since 
Descartes, proceed to analyze the subject before having 
either ascertained or analyzed the object, and are engrossed 
with the method and instrument of philosophy before hav- 
ing determined its principles. All philosophers do and must 
begin with a more or less perfect analysis of thought. Even 
Gioberti, who insists on the ontological method, concedes 
that in learning or teaching philosophy, we must begin with 
psychology, the analysis of thought, or as Cousin says, with 
the analysis of "the fact of consciousness." But the psy- 
chologists proceed immediately from the analysis of thought 
to the analysis of the subject, that is, of the soul, and give 
us simply the philosophy, as it may be called, of the Human 
Understanding, as do Locke and Hume ; of the Active 
powers of the soul as do Reid and Stewart ; or of the 
Human Intellect as does Dr. Porter, president of Yale 
College. This at best can give us, except by an inconse- 
quence, only a science of abstractions, or the subjective forms 
of thought without any objective reality, or barely the 
Wissenschaftslehre, or the science of knowing, of Fichte, 
the science of the instrument and method of science, not 
science itself, the science of empty forms, not the science of 
things. 

It is no wonder, therefore, that philosophy is very gener- 
ally regarded as dealing only with abstractions and empty 
formulas, or that it is very generally despissd and rejected 
by men of clear insight and strong practical sense, as an 
abstract science, and therefore worthless. Mere psychology, 



ANALYSIS OF THE OBJECT. 



4:7 



wj^ich can be only the science of abstractions or empty 
forms, is even worse than worthless, and the popular estimate 
of it is only too favorable. There is no class of men more 
contemptible or mischievous than psj'chologers endeavoring 
to pass themselves off for philosophers, and very few others 
are to be met with in the heterodox world, or even in the 
orthodox world, when not guided and restrained by the 
principles and dogmas of Christian theology. 

This comes from proceeding to the analysis of the subject 
before having analyzed the object. The object, if given 
simultaneously with the subject in the fact of thought, pre- 
cedes it in the order of being or real order ; for it presents 
or affirms itself as -the necessary condition of the soul's 
activity, and of her apprehension of her own existence even. 
It is first in order, and its analysis should precede that of the 
soul ; for as the subject is given only in conjunction with the 
object, or as reflected or mirrored in it, it is only as reflected or 
mirrored in the object that it can know or recognize its own 
powers or faculties. The object determines the faculty, not 
the faculty the object. Man, St. Thomas says, somewhere, as 
cited by Balmes, "is not intelligible in himself, because he is 
not intelligence in himself." If he could know himself in 
himself, or be the direct object of his own intellect, he would 
be God, at least independent of God. The soul knows itself 
only under the relation of subject, as it knows what is not 
itself only under the relation of object, and is 'conscious of 
its own existence only in the intuition of the object. We 
ascertain the powers of the soul from the object she appre- 
hends, not the reality of the object from the powers or 
faculties of the soul. The analysis of the object is, then, 
the necessary condition of the analysis of the subject. 

The analysis of the object, like that of thought, if we 
mistake not, gives us, or discloses as essential in it, three 
elements, the ideal, the empirical, and the relation between 
them. The ideal is the a j)riori and apodictic element, with- 
out which there is and can be no intelligible object, and 
consequently no thought ; the empirical is the fact of 
experience, or the object, whether appertaining to the sen- 
sible order or to the intelligible, as intellectually apprehended 
by the soul ; the relation is the nexus of the ideal and the 
empirical, and is given by the ideal itself. 

Kant has proved in his Critik der reinen Vernunft, or 
Analysis of Pure Reason, that the empirical is not possible 
without the ideal, or as he says, without cognitions, a priori. 



48 



REFUTATION OF ATHEISM. 



which are necessary to every synthetic judgment, or cognition 
a posteriori. The cognitions a priori Kant calls categories 
after the peripatetics, or certain forms under which we neces- 
sarily apprehend all things. He makes these forms or catego- 
ries forms of the human understanding, and therefore makes 
them subjective, not objective, or places them on the side of 
the subject, not on the side of the object. Aristotle makes 
them, apparently, forms neither of the subject nor of the 
object, but of the mundus loyicus, or a world intermediary 
between the subject and the object, or the soul and the 
mundus physicus, or real world. Kant's doctrine, that the 
categories are forms of the subject, is refuted in our analy- 
sis of thought. It implies that the subject can exist and 
operate without the object, and that we see the object as we 
do, not because it is such as we see it, but because such is the 
constitution or law of the human mind, — which denies the 
objective validity of our knowledge already established. 

The peripatetic categories are admissible or not, as the 
intermediary world is or is not taken as the representation of 
the real world. If we take the phantasms and intelligible 
species as the representations of the object to the mind, not 
by the mind, and thus make the categories real, not simply 
formal, the peripatetic doctrine, as wi 1 1 be seen further on, 
is not inadmissible. But if we distinguish the categories from 
the munches physicus or real world, and make them forms 
of an intermediary world, or something which is neither 
subject nor object, we deny them all reality, for no such 
world does or can exist. What is neither subject nor ob ject 
is nothing. St. Thomas, as we understand him, makes, as we 
shall by and by show, the phantasms and species proceed 
from the object, and holds them to be in the reflective order, 
in which the soul is active, representative of the object; 
which permits us to hold that in the intuitive order they are 
simply presentative or the object presenting or affirming 
itself to the passive intellect'. Ileholdsthem to be, in scho- 
lastic language, ohjectum quo not ohjeetum quod or that in 
which the intellect terminates, but that by which it attains 
to the idea, or the intelligible, as will be more fully explained 
further on. The modern peripatetics,\for the most part, 
make the categories purely formal, and gravely tell us that a 
proposition may be logically true and yet really false! 

Cousin identifies the categories of Aristotle and Kant, 
with what he calls necessary and absolute ideas, and 
reduces their number to being and phenomenon, or substance- 



ANALYSIS OF THE OBJECT. 



49 



and cause, but loses their objective reality by making them 
constituent elements of the impersonal reason, which is sub- 
jective, as purely so as is the reflective reason itself. 
The impersonal reason differs, in his philosophy, from the 
personal reason only as to the mode of its activity, and is, as 
the personal, a faculty of the soul, by which the soul knows 
all that it does or can know, whatever the degree or region 
of its knowledge. 

Dr. Ward, of the Dublin Review, places or intends to plac e 
the categories or, as he says, necessary and and eternal ideas, 
on the side of the object, and holds that they are intuitive 
or self-evident ; yet he makes intuition the act of the soul^ 
therefore, empirical, and really places the ideal on the side 
of the subject. He fails to integrate them in real and neces- 
sary being, and says, after Father Kleutgen, that though 
founded on God, they are not God. But what is founded 
on God, and yet is not God, is creature, and creatures Dr. 
Ward cannot hold them to be, for he holds them to be 
necessary and eternal, and necessary and eternal creature is 
a contradiction in terms. What is neither God nor creature 
is nothing, and Dr. Ward cannot say ideas are nothing, for 
he holds them to be intuitive or self-evident, and nothing 
cannot evidence itself, or be an object of intuition. There 
is, also, a further difficulty. Dr. Ward, as do Drs. McCosh 
Porter, Hopkins, and others of the same school, by making 
intuition an act of the soul makes it a fact of experience, 
and the point to be met is, that without intuition of the 
ideal, there is and can be no fact of experience, or empirical 
intuition. It must be borne in mind that Kant has proved 
that without the cognitions a priori, or what we call the 
ideal, no cognition a posteriori is possible. 

Dr. Newman, of whom we would always speak with pro- 
found reverence, in his Essay in aid of a Grammar of 
Assent, apparently at least, not only denies ideal intuition, 
but the objective reality of the ideal itself, and resolves the 
categories or ideas into pure mental abstractions created by 
the mind itself. " All things of the exterior [objective ?] 
world," he says, section second of his opening chapter, " are 
unit and individual, and nothing else ; but the mind not 
only contemplates these unit realities as they exist, but has 
the gift, by an act of creation, to bring before it abstrac- 
tions and generalizations which have no existence, no coun- 
terpart out of it." It would be difficult to express more 
distinctly the Nominalism of Rosceline, or at least the Con- 
vol. n.— 4 



50 



REFUTATION OF ATHEISM. 



ceptualisni of Abelard, censured by the theologians of the 
twelfth century as incompatible with the assertion of the 
ineffable mystery of the Ever-Blessed Trinity. It need not 
surprise us, therefore, that Dr. Newman confesses in his 
Apologia pro Vita sua, that he has never been able by rea- 
soning to prove satisfactorily to his own mind the existence 
of God, for on his philosophy, if we do not misapprehend 
it, he can adduce no argument against the atheist. If we 
are to take the passage cited as a key to his philosophy, 
there can be for him no object in thought but these unit 
realities, for the abstractions and generalizations, being men- 
tal creations, are all on the side of the subject, and no place 
is left for God in the knowable. 

But, unhappily, these "unit realities" are not cognizable 
by themselves alone. To suffice of themselves as objects of 
thought they must suffice for their own existence. What 
cannot exist alone, cannot be known alone. Then every 
one of these unit realities, to be cognizable alone, must be 
an independent, self-existent, and self-sufficing being, that is 
to say, God, and there must be as many Gods as there are 
unit realities or distinct objects of thought or intuition, 
which we need not say is inadmissible. These unit realities 
can be objects of thought or intuition only on condition of 
presenting or affirming themselves to the mind, and they 
can present or affirm themselves in intuition only as they 
are in re, not as they are not, as is sufficiently proved in our 
analysis of thought. If they are not real and necessary 
being they cannot affirm themselves as such ; if they are 
not such they can affirm themselves only as contingent and 
dependent existences that have their being in another, not 
in themselves, and then only under the relation of contingency 
or dependence, or in relation to that on which they depend ; 
consequently they are not cognizable without intuition of 
real and necessary or independent being which creates them. 
Contingency or dependence expresses a relation, but rela- 
tions are cogitable only in the related, and only when both 
terms of the relation are given. Neither term can be infer- 
red from the other, for neither can be thought without the 
other. Hence there is no intuition of the contingent with- 
out intuition of the necessary, or empirical intuition without 
ideal intuition. 

The categories are all correlatives, and are presented in 
two lines, as one and many, the same and the diverse, the 
universal and the particular, the infinite and the finite, the 



ANALYSIS OF THE OBJECT, 



51 



immutable and the mutable, the permanent and the transi- 
tory, the perfect and the imperfect, the necessary and the 
contingent, substance and phenomena, being and existences, 
cause and effect, &c. These severally connote each other, 
and we cannot think the one line without thinking or hav- 
ing intuition of the other. When we think a thing as par- 
ticular, we distinguish it from the universal, or think' it as 
not universal; but evidently we cannot do this unless the 
universal is intuitively present to the mind. The same is 
equally true of every one of the other categories. The 
contingent is not cogitable without intuition of the neces- 
sary ; nor is it possible to think the contingent without 
intuition of its contingency, for, as we have shown in the 
foregoing analysis, the object presents itself by its own 
activity, and therefore must present itself as it is, not as it 
is not. Nothing is more certain than that the relation of 
the categories is no fact of experience, nor than that neither 
correlative is inferred from the other. Yet it is no less cer- 
tain that men, all men, even very young children, regard 
Dr. Newman's " Unit realities " as contingent, as dependent, 
or as not having the cause of their existence in themselves. 
Hence the questions of the child to its mother : " Who made 
the flowers ? who made the trees ? who made the birds ? who 
made the stars? who made father? who made Grod?" 
Hence, too, those anxious questionings of the soul that we 
mark in the ancient heathen and in the modern Protestant 
world : Whence came we ? why are we here ? whither do 
we go? It is only scientists, Comtists or Cosmists, who are 
satisfied with Topsy's theory, "I didn't come, I grow'd." 
But if the soul had no intuition of the relation of contingent 
and necessary, or of cause and effect, it would and could 
ask no such questions. 

It is certain, as a matter of fact, that the soul has present 
to it both the contingent and necessary, as the condition 
a priori of all experience or empirical intuition. So much 
Kant has proved. The object of thought always presents 
itself either as contingent or as necessary. The categories 
of necessity and contingency, not being empirical, since they 
are the forms under which we necessarily apprehend every 
object we do apprehend, we call them ideas, or the ideal. 
The question to be settled is, Is the ideal, without which no 
fact of experience is possible, on the side of the object, or 
on the side of the subject ? Kant places it on the side of 
the subject, and subjects the object to the laws of the soul ; 



52 



"REFUTATION OF ATHEISM. 



we place it on the side of the object, and hold that it is that 
without which the object is not intelligible, and therefore- 
no object at all. Hence we maintain that the object of 
thought is not a simple unit, but consists of three inseparable 
elements, the ideal, the empirical, and their relation. The 
proof that we are right is furnished 1 in our analysis of 
thought, and rests on the principle that what is not is not 
intelligible, and that no object is intelligible save as it really 
exists. This follows necessarily from the fact we have 
established that the object presents or affirms itself by its 
own activity. Contingent existences are active only in their 
relation to the necessary ; consequently are intelligible or 
cognizable only in their relation of contingency. Then, as 
certain as it is that we think, so certain is it that the ideal is 
on the side of the object, not on the side of the subject. 
This will appear still more evident when we recollect that 
the contingent is not apprehensible without the intuition of 
the necessary on which it depends, and the necessary is and 
can be no predicate of the subject, which is contingent exist- 
ence, not necessary being, since it depends on the object for 
its power to act. 

It follows from this that the ideal is given intuitively in 
every thought, as an essential element of the object, and 
therefore that it is objective and real. But while this 
agrees with Plato in asserting the objective reality of the 
ideal, in opposition to Kant, it agrees also with Aristotle 
and St. Thomas in denying that it is given separately. We 
assert the ideal as a necessary element of the object, but we 
deny that, separated from the empirical element, it is or can 
be an object of thought ; for man in this life is not pure 
spirit or soul, but spirit or soul united to body, and cannot 
directly perceive, as maintained by Plato, the old .Gnostics 
or Pneumatici, the modern Transcendental ists, Pierre 
Leroux, and the disciples of the English School founded by 
the opium-eater Coleridge, such as Drs. McCosh and Ward, 
Presidents Marsh, Porter, and Hopkins, to mention no 
others. Hence we deny the proposition of the Louvain 
professors, improbated by the Holy See, that the mind " has 
immediate cognition, at least habitual, of God." Cognition 
or perception is an act of the soul in concurrence with the 
object, and the soul, though the forma corporis, or inform- 
ing principle of the body, never in this life acts without the 
body, and consequently can perceive the ideal only as sen- 
sibly represented. The ideal is really given in intuition, 



ANALYSIS OF THE OBJECT. 



53 



but not by itself alone ; it is given in the empirical fact as 
its a priori condition, and is distinctly held only as sepa- 
rated from it, by reflection, the intellectus agens, or active 
intellect, as maintained by St. Thomas and the whole peri- 
patetic school, as well as by the official teaching in our 
Catholic schools and colleges generally. 

Ideal intuition is not perception or cognition. Per- 
ception is empirical, whether mediate or immediate, and 
whatever its object or its sphere, and in it the soul is always 
the percipient agent. Intuition of the ideal is solely the act 
of the object, and in relation to it the intellect is passive. 
It corresponds to the intelligible species of the peripatetics, 
or rather to what they call species impressa. Dr. Reid, 
founder of the Scottish school, finished by Sir William 
Hamilton, thought he did a, great thing when he vehemently 
attacked, and as he flattered himself made away with, the 
phantasms and intelligible species of the peripatetics, which 
he supposed were held to be certain ideas or immaterial 
images interposed between the mind and the real object, 
and when he asserted that we perceive things themselves, 
not their ideas or images. But Dr. Reid mistook a wind- 
mill for a giant. The peripatetics never held, as he supposed, 
the phantasmata and the species intelligihiles to be either 
ideas or images, nor denied the doctrine of the Scottish 
school, that we perceive things themselves ; and one is a 
little surprised to find so able and so learned a philosopher 
as Gioberti virtually conceding that they did, and giving 
Reid and Sir William Hamilton credit for establishing the 
fact that we perceive directly and immediately external 
things themselves. We ourselves have studied the peripa- 
tetic school chiefly in the writings of St. Thomas, the great- 
est of the Schoolmen, and we accept the doctrine of sensible 
and intelligible species as he represents them, that is, sup- 
posing we ourselves understand him. Both the sensible 
and the intelligible species proceed from the object, and in 
relation to them the intellect is passive, that is, simply in 
potentia ad actum. Now, as we have shown that the intel- 
lect cannot act prior to the presentation of the object or till 
the object is placed in relation with it, it cannot then, either 
in the sensible or the intelligible order, place itself in relation 
with the object, but the object, by an objective act inde- 
pendent of the intellect, must place itself in relation with 
the subject. This is the fact that underlies the doctrine of 
the peripatetic phantasms and intelligible species, and trans- 



£.4 



"REFUTATION OF ATHEISM. 



lated into modern thought means all simply what we call 
ideal intuition, or the presentation or affirmation of the 
ob ject by itself or its placing itself by its own act in relation 
to the intellect as the a priori condition of perception. 

Bnt as the sonl cannot act without the body, the intelligi- 
ble cannot be presented save as sensibly represented, and 
therefore only in the phantasmata or sensible species, from 
which the active intellect abstracts, divides, disengages, or 
separates — not infers — them. Yet the intelligible, the ideal, 
as we say, is really presented, and is the object in which the 
intellect terminates or which it attains, the very doctrine we 
are endeavoring by onr analysis of the object to bring out. 
Reid never understood it, and psychologists either do not 
distinguish the ideal from the empirical, or profess to infer 
it by way of deduction or induction from the sensible. St. 
Thomas does neither, for he holds that the intelligible enters- 
the mind with or in the sensible, and is simply diseng-Bged r 
not concluded, from it. 

It is necessary to be on our guard against confounding the 
question of the reality of the ideal or universal and necessary 
ideas, which correspond to the cognitions a priori of Kant y 
with the scholastic question as to the reality of universals* 
as do the Louvain professors, in the proposition improbated 
by the Holy See, that universals, a parte rei considerata r 
are indistinguishable from God, which confounds universals 
with idea exemplaris, or the type in the divine mind after 
which God creates, and which St. Thomas says is nothing 
else than the essence of God. Idea in Deo nihil est aliud 
quam essentia Dei. The universals of the Schoolmen are- 
divisible into classes : 1, "Whiteness, roundness, and the like y 
to which some think Plato gave reality, as he did to justice,, 
the beautiful, &c, and which are manifestly abstractions, 
with no reality save in their concretes from which the mind 
abstracts them; 2, Genera and species, as humanitas. The 
Scholastics, as far as our study of them goes, do not sharply 
distinguish between these two classes, but treat them both 
under the general head of universals. 

Rosceline and the Nominalists, who fell under ecclesiasti- 
cal censure, held universals to be simply general terms, or 
empty words ; Abelard and the Conceptualists held them to- 
be not empty words, but mental conceptions existing in the 
mind but with no existence a parte rei; Guillaume de 
Champeaux of St. Yictor, and afterwards bishop of Paris, and 
the medieval Realists, are said to have held them to be real or 



ANALYSIS OF THE OBJECT. 



55 



to exist a parte rei, or as they said then, as separate entities ; 
St. Thomas and the Thomists, as is well known, held them 
to exist in mente or in conceptu cum fundamento in re. 
But Cousin, in his Philosophie Seholastique, originally pub- 
lished as a Report to the French Academy on the unpub- 
lished works of Abelard, thinks, not without reason, that he 
finds in a passage cited by Abelard from William de Cham- 
peaux, that the mediaeval realists did not assert the separate 
entity of all universals, but only the reality of genera and 
species, though of course, not either as ideas in the divine 
mind, or as existing apart from their individualization. 

The reality of genera and species is very plainly taught in 
Genesis, for it is there asserted that God created all living 
creatures each after its kind ; and if we were to deny it, 
generation as the prod action of like by like could not be 
asserted ; the dogma of Original Sin, or that all men or the 
race sinned in Adam, would be something more than an 
inexplicable mystery, and we have observed that those theo- 
logians who deny the reality of the species, have a strong 
tendency to deny original sin, or to explain it away so as to 
make it not sin, but the punishment of sin. Certainly, if 
the race were not one and real in Adam, it would be some- 
what difficult to explain how original sin could be propa- 
gated by natural generation. It would be equally difficult 
to explain the mystery of Redemption through the assump- 
tion of human nature by the Word, unless we suppose, what 
is not admissible, that the Word assumed each individual 
man, for to suppose a real human nature common to all men, 
is to assert the reality of the genus or. species. The denial 
of the reality of genera and species not only denies the unity 
of the race and thus denies Original Sin, the Incarnation, 
Redemption, and Regeneration, but also impugns, it seems 
to us, the Mystery of the Blessed Trinity, by denying the 
unity of the nature or essence of the three persons of the 
Godhead, and certain it is that both Rosceline and Abelard 
were accused of denying or misrepresenting that ineffable 
Mystery. 

We are not aware of the views of St. Thomas on this pre- 
cise question, or that he has treated specially of the question 
of genera and species. As to the other class of universals, 
he is unquestionably right. They are conceptions, existing 
in mente cum fundamento in re, that is, mental abstractions, 
formed by the mind operating on the concretes given in 
intuition. They have their foundation in reality. There 



56 



REFUTATION OF ATHEISM. 



is a basis of reality in all our mental conceptions, even in our 
wildest imaginations and our most whimsical fancies, for we 
neither think nor imagine what is absolutely unreal. 

But however this may be, St. Thomas'* does not class what 
we call the ideal intuitively given, with the universals or 
conceptions, with simply a basis in reality. He asserts self- 
evident principles, the first principles of science or of demon- 
stration, which are neither formed by the mind, nor obtained 
from experience, but precede experience and all reasoning, 
and which must be given by ideal intuition. In its sub- 
stance, its principles and method, the real philosopher will 
find that the philosophy of St. Thomas cannot be safely 
rejected, although, as we have already intimated, he may 
find it necessary, in order to meet errors which have arisen 
since his time, to explain some questions more fully than St. 
Thomas has done and to prove some points which he could 
take for granted. 



IX. ANALYSIS OF THE IDEAL. 

The analysis of Thought gives us three inseparable ele- 
ments, all equally real : subject, object, and their relation ; 
the analysis of the Object gives us also three inseparable ele- 
ments, all objectively real, namely, the ideal, the empirical, 
and their relation. The analysis of the Ideal, we shall see, 
gives us again three inseparable elements, all also objectively 
real, namely, the necessary, the contingent, and their rela- 
tion, or being, existences, and the relation between them. 

We have found what logicians call the categories and what 
we call the ideal or objective ideas, and without which no 
thought or fact of experience, as Kant has proved, is possible, 
are identical. Aristotle makes the categories ten and two 
predicaments ; Kant makes them fifteen, two of the sensi- 
bility, twelve of the understanding ( Yerstanol\ and one of 
the reason, ( Verminft) / but whatever their number, they 
are, contrary to Kant, intuitive, and therefore objectively 
real. They are intuitive because they are the necessary con- 
ditions a priori of experience or the soul's intellectual 
action ; and they are objective, since otherwise they could 
not be intuitive, for intuition is the act of the object, not of 
the subject. 



See Summa, p. 1, Q. 2, a. 1. 



ANALYSIS OF THE IDEAL, 



57 



All philosophers agree that whatever exists is arranged 
tinder some one or all of these categories, and is either neces- 
sary or contingent, independent or dependent, one or many, 
the same or the diverse, universal or particular, invariable or 
variable, immutable or mutable, permanent or transitory, 
infinite or finite, eternal or temporary, being or existences, 
cause or effect, creator or creature. They are, as we have 
seen, in two lines, and go, so to speak, in pairs, and are cor- 
relatives, and each connotes the other. 

But these categories may be reduced to a smaller num- 
ber. Cousin contends that all the categories of the upper 
line may be reduced to the single category of being, and 
those of the lower line to the single category of phenome- 
non, or the two lines to substance and cause. Rosmini 
reduces the categories of the upper line to being in general ; 
Father Bothenflue reduces them all to the single category 
of ens reale, or real being, in contradistinction from the ens 
in genere of Bosmini ; the Lou vain professors, as all exclu- 
sive ontologists, do the same. The exclusive psychologists 
reduce them all to the category of the soul or our personal 
existence ; Gioberti reduces the categories of the upper line 
to that of real and necessary being, ens neeessarium et reale, 
and all the categories of the lower line to that of contin- 
gent existences, or briefly, both lines to Being and Exist- 
ences. 

Cousin's reduction is inadmissible, for it omits the second 
line, or denies its reality. Phenomenon, in so far as real or 
any thing, is identical with being, and does not constitute a 
distinct category. Cousin makes being and substance iden- 
tical, a pantheistic error ; for though all being is substance, 
all substances are not real and necessary being. He also 
places cause in the lower line, which is a mistake. The 
effect is in the second line, but not the cause. It is true, 
cause is not in the upper line, for it is not eternal and neces- 
sary. The causative power is in being, and therefore in the 
upper line, but actual cause is the nexus between the two 
lines, and is included in the relation between them, or 
between the necessary and the contingent. This shows that 
the ideal or the categories cannot be reduced to two, for that 
would deny all relation between them, and make them sub- 
ject and predicate without the copula. Gioberti is more 
philosophical in reducing them to three, in his terminology. 
Being, existences, and their relation. 

Cousin, Father Bothennue, Professor Ubaghs, and all the 



58 



REFUTATION OF ATHEISM. 



ontologists, as we shall soon show, are right in their reduc- 
tion of the categories of the upper line to the single category 
of real and necessary being, though Cousin and Spinoza, as 
do all pantheists, err in making being and substance identi- 
cal, and in asserting one only substance, as do the Cosmists, 
for this restricts the ideal to the upper line, and excludes 
entirely the lower line. Hence they resolve all reality into 
being, or substance and phenomenon, the last real only in 
being or substance. 

Real and necessary being is independent, and can stand 
alone, but we found in our analysis of the object, another 
line of categories, the contingent, the particular, the depend- 
ent, &c, equally necessary as the a priori condition of 
experience or empirical intuition, and therefore included in 
the ideal element of the object, and therefore given or pre- 
sented in ideal intuition. The relation between the two 
lines of categories, and which is really the relation, not yet 
considered, between the ideal and the empirical, and also 
given by ideal intuition, will be treated further on. Here we 
are considering only the two lines of categories, given together 
in ideal intuition. For the present we shall consider them 
simply as reduced to two categories, namely, the necessary and 
the contingent, which will soon appear to be necessary being 
and contingent existences. These categories are, as included 
either in the ideal or in the object of thought, correlatives, 
and neither can be inferred or concluded from the other. 
They do not imply one the other, but each connotes [connotat] 
the other, that is to say, neither is cognizable without^the 
other. They who take the necessary as their principium 
can conclude from it only the necessary, not the contin- 
gent, and hence the pure ontologists, who attempt by logi- 
cal deduction from real and necessary being alone to 
obtain the contingent, inevitably fall into pantheism. It 
is equally impossible to conclude, by logical induction, real 
and necessary being from the contingent. Deduction from 
the contingent can give only the contingent, and induction 
can give only a generalization, which remains always in the 
order of the particulars generalized. Hence those who make 
the contingent their principium, if consequent, inevitably 
fall into atheism. The error of each class arises from their 
incomplete analysis of the object and of its ideal element. 
The complete analysis of the object shows, as we have seen, 
that the ideal element is given intuitively, as the a priori 
condition of the empirical. The analysis of the ideal shows 



ANALYSIS OF THE IDEAL. 



59 



that the necessary and the contingent are both given in the 
ideal intuition and there is no need of attempting to con- 
clude either from the other. They are both primitive, and 
being intuitively given, both are and must be objectively 
real. 

But the necessary and the contingent are abstract terms, 
and are real only in their concretes. There is and can be 
no intuition of necessary and contingent as abstractions ; for 
as abstractions they have no objective existence, and there- 
fore are incapable of presenting or affirming themselves in 
intuition, which, as we have shown, is the act of the object, 
not of the subject. The necessary must therefore, since we 
have proved it real, be real and necessary being, and intu- 
ition of it is intuition of real and necessary being. In like 
manner, intuition of the contingent is not intuition of con- 
tingent nothing, but of contingent being, that is, exist- 
ences, the ens secundum quid of the Schoolmen. This is 
what we have proved in proving the reality of the ideal. 
Ideas without which no fact of knowledge is possible, and 
which through objective intuition enter into all our mental 
operations, are not, as they are too often called, abstract 
ideas, but real. 

We have reduced, provisoriiy, the ideas or categories to 
two, necessary and contingent, which we find, in the fact 
that they are intuitively given, are real, and if real, then the 
necessary is real and necessary being, and the contingent is 
contingent, though real, existence. Then the analysis of the 
ideal or a priori element of human knowledge gives us 
being, existences, and their relation. These three terms are 
really given intuitively, but, as we have seen, in the fact of 
thought or experience, they are given as an inseparable ele- 
ment of the object, not as distinct or separate objects of 
thought, or of empirical apprehension, noetic or sensible. 
They are given in the empirical fact, though its a priori 
element, and the mind by its own intuitive action does not 
distinguish them from the empirical element of the object, 
or perceive them as distinct and separate objects of thought. 
We distinguish them only by reflection, or by the analysis 
of the object, which is complex, distinguishing what in the 
object is ideal and a priori 'from what is empirical and a 
posteriori. When we assert the necessary and contingent as 
ideas, the mind, again, does not perceive that the one is 
being and the other existence or dependent on being ; the 
mind perceives this only in reflecting that if given they must 



60 



REFUTATION OF ATHEISM. 



be objective and real, and if real, being and existence, for 
what is not being, or by or from being, is not real. The 
identity of the ideal and the real, and of the real with being 
and what is from being, is arrived at by reflection, and is, if 
yon insist on it, a conclusion, but, as the logicians say, an 
explicative, not an illative conclusion. 

But we have reduced the categories to the necessary and 
contingent, and found the necessary identical with real and 
necessary being, ens necessarium et reale, and the contingent 
identical with contingent existence, ens secundum quid. 
Being is independent, and can stand alone, and can be 
asserted without asserting any thing beside itself ; for who 
says being says being is — a fact misconceived by Sir William 
Hamilton, when he denies that the unconditioned can be 
thought, because thought itself conditions it. But a contin- 
gent existence cannot be thought by itself alone, for contin- 
gency asserts a relation, and can be thought or asserted only 
under that relation. It would be a contradiction in terms 
to assert ideal intuition of the contingent as independent, 
self -existent, for it would not then be contingent. The con- 
tingent, as the term itself implies, has not the cause or 
source of its existence in itself, but is dependent on being. 
The relation between the two categories is the relation of 
dependence of the contingent on the necessary, or of contin- 
gent existences on real and necessary being. This relation 
we express by the word existences. The ex in the word 
existence implies relation, and that the existence is derived 
from being, and, though distinguished from it, depends on 
it, or has its being in it, and not in itself. 

The Scholastics apply the word ens, being, alike to real 
and necessary being and to contingent existences, to what- 
ever is real, and also to whatever is unreal, or a mere figment 
of the imagination, as when they say ens rationis. This 
comes partly from the fact that the Latin language, as we find 
it in the Latin classics, is not rich in philosophic terms, but 
still more from the fact that they treat philosophy chiefly 
from the point of view of reflection, which is secondary, and 
is the action of the mind on its intuitions. Whatever can be 
the object of reflective thought, though the merest abstraction 
or the purest fiction, they call by the common name of ens : 
it may be ens reale or ens possibile, ens necessarium or ens 
contingent, ens simpliciter or ens secundum quid. From the 
Schoolmen the practice has passed into all modern languages. 
We think it would be more simple and convenient, and tend 



ANALYSIS OF THE IDEAL. 



61 



to avoid confusion, to restrict as Gioberti does, being to the 
ens simpliciter of the Schoolmen, and to use the word exist- 
ence, or rather existences, to avoid all ambiguity, to express 
whatever is from being and depends on it, and yet is dis- 
tinguishable from it. 

Making this change in the received terminology of philos- 
ophy, the analysis of the ideal gives us being, Existences, 
and the relation between them. The second term, as the 
lower line in the categories, must be given in the ideal 
intuition, for we cannot perceive existences, or empirically 
apprehend contingents, unless we have present to our mind 
the idea of contingency as the correlative of the necessary, 
as shown in our analysis of the object. 

There remains now to be considered the third term, or the 
relation of the contingent to the necessary, or of existences 
to Being. Being and existences comprise all that is or exists. 
What is not real and necessary, self -existent and independent 
being, is either nothing or it is from being and dependent 
on beings Existences are, as we have seen, distinguished 
from being, and yet are real, for the idea of contingency is 
given in the objective intuition, or in the ideal element of 
the object. Existences are then real, not nothing, and yet 
are not being. Nevertheless they are, as we have seen, 
related to being and dependent on it. But they cannot be 
distinct from being, and yet dependent on being, unless pro- 
duced from nothing by the creative act of being. Being 
alone is eternal, self- existent, and beside being there is and 
can be only existences created by being. Being must either 
create them from nothing by the sole energy of its will, or 
it must evolve them from itself. Not the last, for that 
would deny that they are distinct from being ; then the first 
must be accepted as the only alternative. Hence the analy- 
sis of the ideal gives us being, existences, and the creative 
act of being as the nexus or copula that unites existences to 
being, or the predicate to the subject. 

The ideal then has, as Gioberti truly remarks, the three 
terms of a complete judgment, subject, predicate, and 
copula, and as it is formed by the ideal, it is real, objective, 
formed and presented to us by being itself, presented not 
separately, but as the ideal element "of the object. It con- 
tains a formula that excludes alike ontologism and psycholo- 
gism, and gives the principium of each in its real synthesis. 
The intelligent reader will see, also, we trust, that it excludes 
alike the exaggerations of both, spiritualists and sensists, and 



62 



REFUTATION OF ATHEISM. 



that nothing is more ridiculous than to charge it, as we 
have set it forth, with atheism or pantheism, as many excellent 
persons have done, as they find it stated in the pages of 
Gioberti It refutes, as we trust we shall soon see, both 
atheism and pantheism, and establishes Christian theism. 
Truth, if truth, is truth, let who will tell it, and it is as law- 
ful to accept it when told by Gioberti as when told by Plato, 
Aristotle, Kant, Cousin, rierre Leroux, or Sir William 
Hamilton. 



X. ANALYSIS OF THE RELATION. 

In the analysis of thought, the analysis of the object, and 
the analysis of the ideal we have found in each, three ele- 
ments given simultaneously and inseparably. In thought : 
subject, object, and their relation ; in the object : the ideal, 
the empirical, and their relation ; in the ideal : the necessary 
or being, the contingent or existences, and their relation. 
But though in the last analysis we have stated the relation is 
the creative act, the reader will not fail to perceive that we 
have given only a meagre account of the relation in the 
analysis of thought, and still less in the analysis of the object. 
This has been partly because we are not setting forth a 
complete system of philosophy embracing all the questions 
of rational science, and partly because till we had reached the 
analysis of the ideal, the analysis, or a proper account of the 
relation in the other two cases, could not be given, since the 
relation, as we hope to show, is substantially one and the same 
in each of the three cases. 

The analysis of the relation is not practicable in the sense 
of the other analyses we have made ; for, as relation, it has 
only a single term, and prescinded from the related is 
simply nullity. We can analyze it only in the related, in 
which alone it is real. In the fact of thought we have found 
that the object is active, not passive as most philosophies 
teach ; and therefore that it is the object that renders the 
subject active, reduces it to act, and therefore creates it. St. 
Thomas and, we believe, all the Scholastics, teach that in 
the reception of the phantasms and the intelligible species 
the mind is passive. That which is purely passive is as if it 
were not, for whatever really is or exists, is or exists in actu, 
and therefore is necessarily active. Since, then, the phan- 



ANALYSIS OF THE RELATION". 



63 



tasms and species proceed from the object,* it follows that 
the object actualizes the subject, and renders it active or 
intellectus agens. Hence the relation of object and subject in 
the fact of thought is the relation of cause and effect. The 
object actualizes or creates the subject, not the subject the 
object. 

The relation we have found of the ideal and empirical is 
also the relation of cause and effect. The empirical we 
have found is impossible without the ideal, for it depends 
on it, and does not and' cannot exist without it. That with- 
out which a thing does not and cannot exist, and on which 
it depends, is its cause. The ideal then causes, produces, or 
creates the empirical, and therefore the relation between 
them is the relation of cause and effect. Ideal space pro- 
duces empirical space, and ideal time produces empirical 
time. As the ideal is real and necessary being, ens neces- 
sarium et reale, as we have seen, ideal space is and can be 
only the power of being to externize its own acts, in the 
order of coexistences, and ideal time can only be the power 
of being to externize its own acts successively, or pro- 
gressively. Empirical space is the effect of the exercise of 
this power producing the relation of coexistence ; empirical 
time is its effect in producing the relation of succession, or 
progressive actualization. The relations of space and time 
are therefore resolvable into the relation of cause and effect, 
the reverse of what is maintained by Hume and our modern 
scientists. 

As all the categories of the upper line are integrated in 
real and necessary being, and as all the categories of the lower 
line are integrated in existences, so all relations must be 
integrated in the relation of being and existences, which is 
the act of being, producing, or actualizing existences, and 
therefore the relation of cause and effect. Hence there are 



* We think it a capital mistake of some moderns to suppose, as does 
the very able and learned Father Dalgairns in his admirable treatise on 
Holy Communion, that the Scholastics held that the phantasms and spe- 
cies by which the mind seizes the object are furnished by the mind 
itself. This would make the Scholastic' philosophy a pure psychologism, 
which it certainly is not, though it becomes so in the hands of many who 
profess to follow it. St. Thomas expressly makes the mind passive in 
their reception, and therefore must hold that they are furnished by the 
object, and consequently that in them or by means of them the object 
presents itself to the mind and actualizes it, or constitutes it intellectus 
agens. There are more who swear by St. Thomas than understand him, 
and not a few call themselves Thomists who are really Cartesians. 



6± 



REFUTATION OF ATHEISM. 



and can be no passive relations, or relations of passivity. 
Whatever is or exists is active, and God, who is being in its 
plenitude and infinity, is, as say the theologians, actus jpuris- 
simus, most pure act. Only the active is or exists; the 
passive is non-existent, is nothing, and can be the subject of 
no predicate or relation. So virtually reasons St. Thomas in 
refuting the Gentile doctrine of a materia prima or first 
matter. Aristotle held that matter eternally exists, and that 
all things consist of this eternally existing matter and form 
given it by the equally eternally existing Mind or Intelli- 
gence. St. Thomas modifies this doctrine, and teaches that 
the reality of things, or the real thing itself, is in the form, 
or idea as Plato says, and consequently is not a form 
impressed on a preexisting matter, but a creation from 
nothing; for matter without form, he maintains, is merely 
in potentia ad for mam, therefore passive, therefore mere 
possibility, and therefore, prescinded from the creative act, 
simply non-existent, a pure nullity, or nothing. Even Hegel 
asserts as much when he makes das reine Seyn the equiva- 
lent of das Nicht-Seyn. To give activity to the passive, to 
give form to the possible, or to create from nothing, says one 
and the same thing. 

St. Thomas teaches, as we have seen, that the mind in the 
reception of the phantasms and species is passive, and there- 
fore must hold, if consistent with himself, that prior to the 
affirmation of the object through them the mind does not 
actually exist ; consequently that the affirmation or presenta- 
tion of the object creates the mind, or the intellectual or 
intelligent subject, which, again, proves that the relation of 
subject and object is the relation of cause and effect. If 
then we accept the doctrine of St. Thomas, otherwise undeni- 
able, that the passive and the possible are identical, we must 
deny — since the possible is non-existent, a pure abstraction, 
and therefore, simply nothing — that there are or can be any 
passive relations, and hold that in all relations, ideal or 
empirical, the one term of the relation is the cause of the 
other. This is why one term of the relation cannot be 
known without intuition of the other, or why, as we say, 
correlatives connote one another. 

Here, too, we may see yet more clearly than we have 
already seen, the error of Sir William Hamilton in asserting 
that correlatives are reciprocal, and the still more glaring 
error of Cousin in asserting the same thing of cause and 
effect. Correlatives connote each other, it is true ; but not 



ANALYSIS OF THE RELATION". 



85 



as reciprocal, for in the intuition they are affirmed, and in 
cognition connoted, the one as creating or producing the 
other, and it would be absurd to assert that the effect creates 
the cause, or that cause and effect produce reciprocally each 
the other. Sir William Hamilton is misled by his failure to 
comprehend that all relations are integrated in the relation 
of being and existences, and are therefore relations of cause 
and effect, or of the productive or creative power of being 
producing existences. He, as does Hume, excludes the 
notion or conception of power, and therefore not only the 
creative act of being, but of all activity, and conceives all 
relations as passive. They are all resolvable into relations 
of coexistence and succession, or relations of space and time, 
and therefore relations of the passive ; for excluding ontol- 
ogy from the region of science, or the cogitable, Sir W. 
Hamilton can assert no creative or productive power, and 
recognize no relation of real cause and effect. 

Neither Cousin nor Sir William Hamilton ever under- 
stood that the object affirmed in thought, and without which 
there is and can be no thought, actualizes, that is, places or 
creates the subject, and renders it thinking or cognitive sub- 
ject. The object does not simply furnish the occasion or 
necessary condition to the subject for the exercise of a 
power or faculty it already possesses, but creates the mind 
itself, and gives it its faculty, as we have already proved in 
proving that in ideal intuition the soul is passive, that is — - 
as St. Thomas implies in resolving the passive into the pos- 
sible — non-existent, and therefore the subject of no relation 
or predicate. The ideal or intuitive object must then be 
real and necessary being, for the contingent is not creative, . 
and hence the intuition of being, which Sir William Ham- 
ilton denies, is not only necessary to the eliciting of this or 
that particular thought, but to the very existence of the 
soul as intelligent subject, and therefore must be a persistent 
fact, as will be more fully explained in the section on Exist- 
ences. 

It follows from this that the relation of subject and object,, 
or rather of object and subject, in every thought is the rela- 
tion, as we have said, of cause and effect. It is the third 
term or copula in the ideal judgment, and is in every judg- 
ment, whether ideal or empirical, that which makes it a 
judgment or affirmation. Being, Gioberti says, contains a 
complete judgment in itself, for it is equivalent to being is ; 
but this is nothing to our present purpose. Being and exist- 

Vol. H.— 5 



66 



REFUTATION OF ATHEISM. 



ences as subject and predicate constitute no judgment with- 
out the copula that joins the predicate to the subject. As 
the copula can proceed only from being, or the subject of 
the predicate, as its act, the ideal judgment is necessarilj^ 
Ens Great existentias / and, as the object creates or produces 
the predicate, the judgment in its three terms is Divine and 
apodictic, the necessary and apodictic ground of every 
human or empirical judgment, without intuition of which 
the human mind can neither judge nor exist. 

It is not pretended of course that all judgments are ideal, 
any more than it is that every cause is first cause. There 
are second causes, and consequently second or secondary, 
that is, empirical judgments. The second cause depends on 
the first cause which is the cause of all causes ; so the empi- 
rical judgment depends on the ideal or Divine judgment 
which it copies or imitates, as the second cause always copies 
or imitates in its own manner and degree the first cause. 
There is no judgment — and every thought is a judgment — 
without the creative act of being creating the mind and fur- 
nishing it the light by which it sees and knows ; yet, the 
immediate relation in empirical judgments, that is, judg- 
ments which the soui herself forms, though a relation of 
cause and effect, is not the relation between being and exist- 
ences, as we once thought, though perhaps erroneously, that 
Gioberti maintained, and which were sheer pantheism, inas- 
much as it would deny the existence of second causes, and 
make God the sole and universal actor. The relation in the 
ideal judgment is only eminently the cause in the empirical 
judgment, in the sense in which being is the eminent cause 
of all actions, in that it is the cause of all causes. 

The copula or relation in the ideal judgment is the creative 
act of being, or sub ject creating the predicate, as we shall soon 
prove, and uniting it to itself. This is true of all relations. 
The first term of the relation of subject and predicate, is the 
cause of the second term, and by its own causative act unites 
the predicate to itself as its subject. Second causes have, in 
relation to the first cause, the relation of dependence, are 
produced by it, are its effects or predicates ; but in relation to 
their own cifects, they are efficient causes, and represent 
creative being. We are existences and wholly dependent 
on real and necessary being, for our existence and our pow- 
ers are simply the effect of the divine creative act or activity; 
but in relation to our own aetf we are cause; we are the 
subject, they are the predicati , and our act producing them 



ANALYSIS OF THE RELATION. 



67 



is the copula. In this sense the second cause copies the first 
cause, and the empirical judgment copies the ideal or, as we 
have called it, the Divine judgment. 

We say this not by way of proof that the relation between 
being and existence is the creative act of being, which fol- 
lows necessarily from the reduction of the categories to being, 
existences, and their relation, or subject, predicate, and 
copula, for the copula can be nothing else than the creative 
act of being ; but to prevent the mistake of supposing that 
being is the agent that acts in our acts, and that our acts are 
predicates of the Divine activity ; which is the mistake into 
which the Duke of Argyll falls in his " Keign of Law," and 
of all who impugn Free Will, and deny the reality of second 
causes. Having done this, and having resolved the relation 
of being aud existences, and all relations into the relation of 
cause and effect, we may now proceed to consider the Fact 
of Creation. 



XI. THE FACT OF CREATION. 

The great Gentile apostasy from the Patriarchial religion 
originated in the loss of the primitive tradition of the fact 
of creation : that in the beginning God created the heavens 
and the earth, and all things visible and invisible. No Gen- 
tile philosophy, known to us, recognizes the fact of creation ; 
and the mother-error of all Gentilism is pantheism, and 
pantheism is no vulgar error, originating with the ignorant 
and unlettered many, but the error of the cultivated few, 
philosophers and scientists, who, by their refinements and 
subtile speculations on the relation of cause and effect, first 
obscure in their own minds and then wholly obliterate from 
them the fact of creation. 

Dr. Dollinger, in his Heathenism before Christianity, 
assumes that heathenism originated with the ignorant and 
vulgar, not with the learned and scientific. But this view 
cannot be accepted by any one who has watched the course 
of philosophy and the sciences for the last three centuries. 
Three centuries ago Christian theism was held universally 
by all ranks and conditions of civilized society, and atheism 
was regarded with horror, and hardly dared show its head ; 
now, the most esteemed, the most distinguished philosophers 
and scientists, like Emerson, Herbert Spencer, Professor 
Huxley, Emile Littre, Claude Bernard, Vcigt, Bachmann, 



68 



REFUTATION OF ATHEISM. 



Sir John Lubbock, and Professor Tyndall, to mention no 
Others, are decided pantheists, and undisguised atheists. 
They are not merely tolerated, but are held to be the great 
men and shining lights of the age. Pantheism — atheism — ■ 
in our times originates with philosophers and scientists and 
descends to the people, and, in the absence of all proof to 
the contrary, it is fair to presume that it was the same in 
ancient times. The corruption, alike of language and of 
doctrine, is always the work of philosophers and of the 
learned or the half-learned, never of the people. 

The various heathen mythologies never originated, and 
never could have originated, with the ignorant multitude, or 
with savage and barbarous tribes. These mythologies are in 
great part taken up with the generation or genealogy of the 
gods, and bear internal evidence that they had for their 
starting point the ineffable •mystery of the Blessed Trinity, 
and have grown out of efforts by philosophers and theolo- 
gians to symbolize the eternal generation of the Son, and the 
procession of the Holy Ghost, which they obscured and lost 
by their inappropriate symbols, figures, and allegories. They 
all treat the universe as generated by the gods, and for cos- 
mogony give us theogony. 

Generation is simply explication or development, and the 
generated is of the same nature with the generator, as the 
Church maintains in defining the Son to be consubstantial 
with the Father. Hence the visible universe, as well as the 
invisible forces of nature, as generated by the gods, was held 
to be divine, both as a whole and in all its parts. Rivers 
and brooks, hills and valleys, groves and fountains, the ocean 
and the earth, mountains and plains, the winds and the 
waves, storms and tempests, thunder and lightning, the sun, 
moon, and stars ; the elements, fire, air, water, and earth : 
the generative forces of nature, vegetable, animal, and 
human, were all counted divine, and held to be proper 
objects of worship. Hence the fearful and abominable 
superstitions that oppressed and still oppress heathen nations 
and tribes, the horrid, cruel, filthy, and' obscene rites which 
it were a shame even to name. These rites and superstitions 
follow too logically from the assumed origin of all things 
visible and invisible in generation or emanation, to have 
originated with the unlearned and vulgar, or not to have 
been the work of philosophers and theologers. 

Dr. Dollinger holds that polytheism in polytheistic nations 
and tribes precedes monotheism, or the worship of one God, 



THE FACT OF CREATION. 



69 



and denies that pantheism is the primal error of Gentilism. 
lie appears to hold that the nations that apostatized, after 
the confusion of tongues at B^b j1, fell at once into the low- 
est forms of African fetichism, and from that worked their 
way up, step by step, to polished Greek and Roman poly- 
theism, and thence to Jewish and Christian monotheism.. 
But this is contrary to the natural law of deterioration. 
Men by supernatural grace may be elevated from the lowest 
grade to the highest at a single bound, but no man falls at 
once from the highest virtue to the lowest depth of vice or 
crime, or from the sublimest truth to the lowest and most 
degrading form of error. African fetichism is the last stage, 
uot the first, of polytheism. The first error is always that 
which lies nearest to the truth, and that demands the least 
apparent departure from orthodoxy, or men's previous 
beliefs. We know, historically, that the race began in the 
patriarchal religion, in what we call Christian theism, and 
pantheism is the error that lies nearest, and that which most 
easily seduces the mind trained in Christian theism. 

What deceives Dr. Dollinger and others is that they attri- 
bute the manifest superiority of Greek and Roman polythe- 
ism over African fetichism to a gradual amelioration of the 
nations that embraced it; but history presents us no such 
amelioration. The Homeric religion departs less from the 
patriarchal religion than the polytheism of any later period 
in the history of either pagan Greece or Rome. The super- 
iority of Greek and Roman polytheism is due primarily to 
the fact that it retained more of the primitive tradition, and 
the apparent amelioration was due to the more general initi- 
ation, as time went on, into the Eleusinian and other myste- 
ries, in which the earlier traditions were preserved, and, after 
Alexander the Great, to more familiar acquaintance with the 
tradition of the East, especially the Jews. The mysteries 
were instituted after the great Gentile Apostasy, but from 
all that is possible now to ascertain of them, they preserved, 
not indeed the primitive traditions of the race, but the earliest 
traditions of the nations that apostatized. Certain it is, if 
the Unity of God was taught in them, as seems not improb- 
able, we have no reason to suppose that they preserved the 
tradition of the one God the creator of the heavens and the 
earth. Neither in the mysteries nor in the popular myth- 
ologies, neither with the Greeks nor the Romans, the Syrians 
nor Assyrians, neither with the Egyptians nor the Indians, 
Beither with the Persians nor the Chinese, neither with the 



70 



REFUTATION OF ATHEISM. 



Kelts nor the Teutons do we find any reminiscences of the 
creative act, or fact of creation from nothing. 

The oldest of the Vedas speak of God as spirit, recognize 
most of his essential attributes, and ascribe to him apparently 
moral qualities, but we find no recognition of him as Creator. 
Socrates, as does Plato, dwells on the justice of the Divinity, 
but neither recognizes God the Creator. Pore Gratry con- 
tends indeed, in his Connaissance de Dieu, that Moses, 
Plato, Aristotle, Confucius, St. Augustine, St. Thomas 
Aquinas, Descartes, Malebranche, Leibnitz, Bossuet, Fenelon, 
in fact all philosophers of the first rank of all ages and 
nations, agree in asserting substantially one and the same 
theodicsea. Yet Plato asserts no God the Creator, at best, 
only an intelligent artificer or architect, doing the best he 
can with preexisting material. His theology is well summed 
up by Yirgil in his ^Eneid : ' 

Spiritus intus alit, totamque infusa per artus, 
Mens agitat molem, et magno se corpore miscet. 

Artistotle asserts God as the anima mundi, or soul of the 
world, followed by Spinoza in his Natura Naturans, and 
which Pope versifies in his shallow Essay on Man. 

All are but parts of one stupendous whole, 
Whose body nature is, and God the soul ; 
That, changed through, all, and yet in all the same, 
Great in the earth as in the ethereal frame ; 
Warms in the sun, refreshes in the breeze, 
Glows in the stars, and blossoms in the trees; 
Lives through all life, extends through all extent, 
Spreads undivided, operates unspent, &c. 

Here is no creative God ; there is only the anima mundi 
of the Brahmins, and of the best of the pagan philosophers. 
• Even some Christian philosophers, while they hold the fact 
of creation certain from revelation, deny its probability by 
reason. St. Paul says " by faith we understand the world 
was framed by word of God," but St. Thomas, if we are 
not mistaken, teaches that the same truth may be at once 
a matter of revelation or faith and a truth cognizable by 
natural reason and matter of science, and certain it is that 
our greatest theologians undertake to prove the fact of 
creation from reason or reasoning, or from data supplied by 
the natural light of the soul, for they all attempt a rational 
refutation of pantheism. 



THE FACT OF CREATION. 



71 



The analysis of the ideal element of the object in thought, 
we have seen, shows that it is resolvable into being, exist- 
ences, and their relation, and the analysis of the relation, 
real only in the related, brings us, so to speak, face to face 
with the Divine creative act. Real and necessary being can 
exist without creating, for it is, as say the theologians, 
actus purissimus, therefore in itself ens pei^fectissbniun, 
and is not obliged to go out of itself, in order either to be or 
to perfect or complete itself, in which respect it is the con- 
trary of the reine Seyn of Hegel. It is in itself infinite 
Fulness, Pleroma, Plenum, while the reine Sei/n is the 
Byssos of the old Gnostics, or the Yoid of the Buddhists, 
and even Hegel makes it not being, but a Becoming — das 
Werden. The being given in ideal intuition is real and 
necessary being, self-existent, self-sufficing, complete in 
itself, wanting nothing, and incapable of receiving any thing 
in addition to what it is, and is eternally. 

Hence the ontologist, starting with being as his prin- 
eipium, can never arrive at existences, for being can be 
under no extrinsic or intrinsic necessity of creating. But, 
may not the psychologist conclude being from the intuition 
of existences? Not at all, because existences, not existing 
in and of themselves, are neither cognizable nor conceivable 
without the intuition of being. Yet, though being is suffi- 
cient in all respects for itself, it is cognizable by us only 
mediante its own act creating us and affirming itself as the 
first term or being in the ideal element of the object in 
thought, and therefore only in its relation to the second 
term, or existences. This relation under which both being 
and existences, the necessary and the contingent, are given, 
is the creative act of being, as we have seen, and therefore, 
as that mediante which both being and existences are given, 
is necessarily itself given in ideal intuition. It is as neces- 
sarily given in the object in every thought as either being 
or existences, the necessary or the contingent, and therefore 
is objectively as certain as either of the other two terms 
without which no thought is possible, and is in fact more 
immediately given, since it is only mediante the relation or 
creative act of being that either being or existences them- 
selves are given, or are objectively intuitive. 

But not therefore, because being is cognizable only in its 
relation to existences, does it follow that being itself is rela- 
tion, or that all our cognitions are relative, or, as Gioberti 
maintains, that all truth is relative ; nay, that the essence 



72 



REFUTATION OF ATHEISM. 



of God. as implied in the mystery of the Holy Trinity, is in 
relation, in the relation of the three Persons of the God- 
head. The relation is given in ideal intnition as the act of 
real and necessary being. The relation then is extrinsic, 
not intrinsic, and since being is real, necessary, independent, 
self -existing, and self-sufficing, the creative act must be not 
a necessary, but a free, voluntary act on the part of being. 
The relation, then, is not intrinsic, but freely and voluntarily 
assumed. 

. Being is given in ideal intuition mediante its creative act, 
then as creator or ens crearis. But as nothing extrinsic or 
intrinsic can oblige being, which is independent and self- 
sufficing, to create or to act ad extra, it must be a free crea- 
tor, free to create or not create, as it chooses. Then being 
must possess free-will and intelligence, for without intelli- 
gence there can be no will, and without will no choice, no 
free action. Being then must be in its nature rational, and 
then it must be personal, for personality is the last comple- 
ment of rational nature, that is, it must be a suppositum 
that possesses, by its nature, intelligence and free-will. Then 
being, real and necessary, being in its plenitude, being in 
itself, is — God, and creator of the heavens and the earth, and 
all things visible and invisible. 

But, it is objected, this assumes that we have immediate 
intuition of being, and therefore of God, which is a propo- 
sition improbated by the Holy See. Not to our knowledge. 
The Holy See has improbated, if you will, the proposition 
that the intellect has immediate cognition, that is, percep- 
tion or enrpirical intuition of God ; but not, so far as we are 
informed, the proposition that we have, mediante its creative 
act, intuition of real and necessary being in the ideal element 
of the object in thought. The Holy See has defined against 
the Traditionalists, that "the existence of God can be 
proved with certainty by reasoning." But will the objector 
tell us how we can prove the existence of God by any 
argument from premises that contain no intuition of the 
necessary, and therefore, since the necessary, save as con- 
creted in being, is a nullity, of real and necessary being ? 
We may have been mistaught, but our logic-master taught 
us that nothing can be in the conclusion, not contained, in 
principle at least, in the premises. If we had not ideal intu- 
ition of real and necessary being, there is no possible demon- 
stration of the existence of God. St. Thomas finds the prin- 
ciple of his demonstration of the existence of God, precisely 



THE FACT OF CREATION. 



73 



as we have done, in the relation of cause and effect, or as we 
.say, in the relation of being and existences ; but whence does 
the mind come into possession of that relation, or of the 
ideas expressed by the terms cause and effect f St. Thomas 
does not tell us ; he simply takes it for granted that we have 
them. What have we done but prove, which he does not 
do, by analyzing, first, thought, then the object, then the 
ideal, and finally the relation, that Ave have them, and at the 
same time prove that being is a free, not a necessary cause, 
and thus escape pantheism, which we should not do, if we 
made cause as ultimate as being, Ens creans, not simply ens 
in se, that is : Ens acting is the cause, and existences or 
creatures are the effect. 

The ideal, as we have found it, does not differ, we con- 
cede, from the ideal formula of Gioberti, Ens creat exist- 
entias, or Being creates existences. This has been objected 
to as pantheistic. Nay, an eminent Jesuit Father charged 
us with atheism because we defended it and we answered 
him that to deny it would be atheism. Even distinguished 
professors of philosophy and learned and excellent men not 
unfrequently fall into a sort of routine, let their minds be 
cast in certain moulds, and fail % to recognize their own 
thoughts when expressed in unfamiliar terms. We have no 
call to defend Gioberti, who, for aught we know, may have 
understood the ideal formula in a pantheistic sense, but we do 
not believe he did, and we know that we do not. Gioberti 
asserts the formula, but declares it incapable of demonstra- 
tion ; we think we have clearly shown, by the several 
analyses into which we have entered, that each term of the 
formula is given intuitively in the ideal element of the 
object, and is as certain and as undeniable as the fact of 
thought or our own existence, and no demonstration in any 
case whatever can go further. As we have found and pre- 
sented the formula it is only the first verse of Genesis, or 
the first article of the Creed. We see not, then, how it can 
be charged either with atheism or pantheism. 

Perhaps the suspicion arises from the use of the present 
tense, creat, or "is creating," as if it was intended to 
assert being as the immanent cause — the causa essentialis, 
not as the causa efficiens, of existences ; but this is not the 
case with us, nor do we believe it was with Gioberti, for he 
seems to us to take unwearied pains to prove the contrary. 
We use the present tense of the verb to indicate that the cre- 
ative act that calls existences from nothing is a permanent 



REFUTATION OF ATHEISM. 



or continuous act, that it is identically one and the same act 
that creates and that sustains existences, or that the act of 
creation and of conservation are identical, as we shall explain 
in the next section. 

The formula is infinitely removed from pantheism, 
because, though given in intuition mediante the creative 
act of being, being itself is given as real and necessary, inde- 
pendent and self-sufficing, and therefore under no extrinsic 
or intrinsic necessity of creating. The creative act is, as we 
have seen, a free act, and it is distinguished, on the one 
hand, from being as the act from the actor, and on the other, 
from existences as the effect from the cause. There is here 
no place for pantheism, less indeed than in the principle of 
cause and effect which St. Thomas adopts as the principle of 
his demonstration of the existence of God. The relation of 
cause and effect is necessary, and if cause is placed in the 
category of being, creation is necessary, which is pantheism. 
Yet St. Thomas, the greatest of the Schoolmen, was no pan- 
theist. We have avoided the possibility of mistake by plac- 
ing the causative power in the category of being, but the 
exercise of the power in the category of relation, at once 
distinguishing and connecting being and existences. 

The objector forgets, moreover, that while we have by 
our analysis of thought established the reality of the object, 
or its existence a parte rei, and asserted the objectivity 
and therefore the reality of the ideal, we have nowhere 
found or asserted the ideal alone as the object in thought. 
We have found and asserted it only as the ideal element 
of the object, which must in principle precede the empirical 
element, but it is never given separately from it, and it 
takes both the ideal and the empirical in their relation to 
constitute the object in any actual thought. The ideal and 
the empirical elements of the complex object are distin- 
guished by the intellectus agens, or reflection, in which the 
soul acts, never by intuition, ideal or empirical, in either of 
which the action originates with the object. Most men. 
never do distinguish them during their whole lives ; even 
the mass of philosophers do not distinguish them, or distin- 
guish between intuition and reflection. The peripatetics, 
in fact, begin with the reflective activity, and hardly touch 
upon the question of intuition, save in what they have to 
say of phantasms and species. Their principles they take 
from reflection, not from the analysis of thought or its 
object. We do not dissent from their principles or their 



THE FACT OF CREATION. 



75 



method, but we do not regard their principles as ultimate, 
and we think the field of intuition, back of reflection, needs 
a culture which it does not receive from them, not even 
from St. Thomas, still less from those routinists who profess 
.to follow him. We do not dissent from the Thomist philos- 
ophy ; we accept it fully and frankly, but not as in all 
respects complete. There are, in our judgment, questions 
that lie back of the starting-point of that philosophy, which, 
in order to meet the subtilties and refinements of modern 
pantheists or atheists, the philosopher of to-day must raise 
and discuss. 

These questions relate to what in principle precedes the 
reflective action of the soul, and are solved by the distinc- 
tion between intuition and reflection, and between ideal 
intuition and empirical intuition or perception, that is, cog- 
nition. What we explain by ideal intuition, the ancients 
called the dictates of reason, the dictates of nature, and 
assumed them to be principles inserted in the very constitu- 
tion of the human mind ; Descartes called them innate 
ideas ; Reid regarded them as constituent principles of 
man's intellectual and moral nature ; Kant, as the laws or 
forms of the human understanding. All these make them 
more or less subjective, and overlook their objectivity, and 
consequently, cast doubts on the reality of our knowledge. 
" It may be real to us, but how prove that it is not very 
unreal to other minds constituted differently from ours ?" 
We have endeavored to show that these are the ideal ele- 
ments of the fact of experience, and are given in objective 
or ideal intuition, which is the assertion to the mind by its 
own action of real and necessary being itself, and therefore 
our knowledge, as far as it goes, is universally true and apo- 
dictic, not true to our minds only. 

The objection commonly raised to the ideal formula, Ens 
creat existential, is, not that it is not true, but that it is not 
the principle from which philosophy starts, but the end at 
which philosophy arrives. This, in one sense, if we speak 
of the reflective order, is true, and the philosophy most in 
vogue does not reach it even as its end at all. Yet by using 
reflection we shall find that it is given in the object of every 
thought, as we have shown, the first as well as the last. Ideal 
intuition is a real affirmation to the mind by the act of the 
ideal itself, but it is not perception or distinct cognition, 
because, as we have said, it is not given separately, but only 
as the ideal or a priori element of the object, and is never 



76 



REFUTATION OF ATHEISM. 



intuitively distinguished or 'distinguishable from it. This 
is, we think, a sufficient answer to the objection, which is 
founded on a misapprehension of what is really meant by 
the assertion that the ideal formula is the principle of 
science and intuitively given. It is so given, but it is only 
by reflection that the mind distinguishes it, and is aware of 
possessing it. 



XH.— EXISTENCES. 

Having found the first term of the ideal formula to be 
real and necessary being, and that real and necessary being 
is God the creator of all things distinguishable from him- 
self, we may henceforth drop the term being or ens and use 
that of Deus or God, and proceed to consider the second 
term, existences or creatures. God and creatures include 
all that is or exists. What is not creature and yet is, is God ; 
what is not God and yet exists, is creature, the product of 
the act of God. What is neither God nor creature is nothing. 
There is nothing and can be nothing that is not either the 
one or the other. Abstractions, prescinded from their con- 
cretes, and possibilities prescinded from the power or ability 
of the real, we cannot too often repeat, are nullities, and no 
object of intuition, either ideal or empirical. This excludes 
the ens in genere, or being in general, of Rosmini, and the 
reine Seyn of Hegel, which is also an abstraction, or merely 
possible being. An abstract or possible being has no power 
or tendency, as Hegel pretends, to become by self-evolution 
either a concrete or actual being. Evolution of nothing 
gives nothing. Hence whatever truth there may be in 
the details of the respective philosophies of Rosmini and 
Hegel, they are in their principles unreal and worthless, 
proceeding on the assumption that nothing can make itself 
something. Existences are distinguishable from being and 
are nothing without the creative act of God. Only that act 
stands between them and absolute nullity. God then does 
not form them from a preexisting matter, but creates them 
from nothing, lie does not evolve them from himself, for 
then they would be the Divine Being itself, and indistin- 
guishable from it, contrary to what has already been estab- 
lished, namely, that they are distinguished from God as well 
as joined to him mediants his creative act. God is not a 
necessary but a free creator; creatures are not then evolved 



EXISTENCES. 



77 



from his own being, but himself, a free creator, is necessarily 
distinct from and independent of them; and as without 
creation there is nothing but himself, it follows necessarily 
that he must, if he creates existences at all, create them from 
nothing, by the word of his power, as Christian theology 
teaches. 

But the fact that they are creatures and distinct from the 
Creator proves, also, that they are substances, or % substantial 
existences, and therefore, as philosophers say, second causes. 
If. creatures had no substantial existence, they would be 
mere phenomena or appearances of the divine being or sub- 
stance, and therefore could not be really distinguishable 
from God himself; which would be a virtual denial of the 
creative act and the reality of existences, and therefore of 
God himself ; for it has been shown that there is no intu- 
ition of being save mediante the creative act of being, or 
without the intuition of existences, that is, of both terms of 
the relation. It would deny, what has been amply proved, 
that the object of intuition, whether ideal or empirical, is 
and must be real, because it does and must present or affirm 
itself, which, if unreal or mere appearance, it could not do, 
since the unreal has no activity and can be no object of 
thought, as the Cosmists themselves concede, for they hold 
the phenomena without the substance that appears in them 
are unthinkable. Moreover, the object in intuition presents 
or affirms itself as it is, and existences all present or affirm 
themselves as real, as things, as substances, as second causes, 
and really distinguishable from Dr. Newman's "Notional" 
propositions, which propose nothing, and in which nothing 
real is noted. 

It is here where Cousin and the pantheists, who do not 
expressly deny creation, commit their fatal mistake. Spinoza, 
Cousin, and others assert one only substance, which they 
call God, and which the Cosmists call Nature. Hence the 
creative act, if recognized at all, produces only phenomena, 
not substantial existences, and what they call creation is 
only the manifestation or apparition of the one only sub- 
stance. It is possible that this error comes from the defini- 
tion of substance adopted by Descartes, and by Spinoza 
after him, namely, that which exists or can be conceived in 
itself, without another. This definition was intended by 
the Schoolmen, and possibly by Descartes also, as simply to 
mark the distinction between substance and mode, attribute, 
or accident ; but, taken rigidly as it is by Spinoza, it war- 



78 



REFUTATION OF ATHEISM. 



rants his doctrine, that God is the one only substance, as he 
is the one only being, for he alone exists in se. The uni- 
verse and all it contains are therefore only modes or attri- 
butes of God, the only substance. The error, also, may 
have arisen in part from using being and substance as per- 
fectly synonymous terms. Ens is substantia, but every 
substantia is not ens. Substance is any thing that can sup- 
port-accidents or produce effects; Ens is that which is, and 
in strictness is applicable to God alone, who gives his name, 
to Moses as I am ; I am that am, — SUM QUI SUM. There 
may be, mediante the creative act of God, many substances 
or existences, but there is and can be only one being, God. 
All existences have their being, not in themselves, but in 
God mediante the creative act, according to what St. Paul 
says, " in him we live, and move, and are," in ipso vivimus, et 
movemur, et sumus. Acts xvii, 28. 

Existences are substantial, that is, active or causative in 
their own sphere or degree. The definition of substance by 
Leibnitz — though we think we have found it in some of the 
mediaeval Doctors, as vis activa, corresponding to the Ger- 
man hroft and the English and French force, is a proper 
definition so far, whatever may be thought of what he adds, 
that it always involves effort or endeavor. In this sense 
existences must be substances or else they could not be given 
intuitively, as in our analysis of the object we have seen they 
are, for in intuition the object is active and presents or 
affirms itself. Strictly speaking, as we have seen in the 
analysis of relation, nothing that exists is or can be passive, 
for passivity is simply in jpotentia ad actum / whatever 
exists at all exists inactu&vid so far is necessarily vis activa. 
Existences in their principle are given intuitively, and their 
principle cannot be substantial and they unsubstantial. But 
it is necessary here to distinguish between the substans and 
the substantia, between that which stands under and upholds 
or supports existences or created substances, and the exist- 
ences themselves. The substans is the creative act of God, 
and the substantia or existence is that which it stands under 
and upholds. This enables us to correct the error of the 
deists, who regard the cosmos, though created in the first 
instance and set a-going, now that it is created and constituted 
with its laws and forces as able to go of itself without any 
supercosmic support, propulsion, or direction, as a clock or 
watch, when once wound up and set a-going, goes of itself 
— till it runs down. It has now no need of God, it is surfi- 



, EXISTENCES. 79 

cient for itself, and God has nothing to do with it, but, if he 
chooses, to contemplate its operation from his supramundane 
height. But this' old deistical race, now nearly extinct, 
except with our scientists, forgot that the watch or clock 
does not run by its own inherent force, and that it is pro- 
pelled by a force in accordance with which it is constructed 
indeed, but which is exterior to it and independent of it. 
The cosmos, not having its being in itself and existing only 
mediante the creative act of being, can subsist and operate 
only by virtue of that act. It is only that act that draws 
it from nothing and that stands between all existences or 
creatures and nothing. Let that act cease and we should 
instantly sink into the nothingness we were before we were 
created. This proves that the act of creation and that of con- 
servation are one and the same act, and hence it is that intui- 
tion of existences is, ipso facto, intuition of the creative act, 
without which they are nothing, and of which they are only 
the external terminus or product. This explains the dis- 
tinction between substans and substantia, and shows w T hy 
the substans is and must be the creative act of God. Sub- 
stances rest or depend on the creative act for their very 
existence ; it is their foundation, and they must fall through 
without it, though they stand under and support their own 
effects or productions as second causes. 

The creative act, it follows, is a permanent not a transient 
act, and God is, so to speak, a continuous creator, and 
creation is a fact not merely in the past but in the present, 
constantly going on before our eyes. We would call God the 
immanent, not the transitory cause of creation, as the deist 
supposes, were it not that theologians have appropriated the 
term immanent cause in their explanation of the relation of 
the Father to the Son and of both Father and Son to the 
Holy Ghost in the ever-blessed Trinity, and if it had not 
been abused by Spinoza and others. Spinoza says God is 
the immanent not the transitory cause of the universe ; but 
he meant by this that God is immanent in the universe as the 
essence or substance is the cause of the mode or attribute, 
that is, the causa essentialis, not causa ejficiens, which is 
really to deny that God creates substantial existences, and to 
imply that he is the subject acting or causing in phenomena. 
God is immanent cause onlj T in the sense that he is manent 
77iediante his creative act in the effect or existences produced 
from nothing by the omnipotent energy of his word, creat- 
ing and sustaining them as second causes or the subject of 



80 



REFUTATION OF ATHEISM. 



their own acts, not as the subject acting in them. It is what 
theologians call the u efficacious presence" of God in all his 
works. He is the eminent cause of the acts of all his 
creatures, inasmuch as he is the cause of their causality, 
causa causarum / as we explained in our analysis of Rela- 
tion, but he is not the subject that acts in their acts. This 
shows the nearness of God to all the works of his hands, 
and their absolute dependence on him for all they are, all 
they can be, all they can do, all they have or can have. It 
shows simply that they are nothing, and therefore can know 
nothing, but by his creative act. The grossest and most 
palpable of all sophisms is that which makes man and nature 
God, or God identically man and nature; Either error 
originates in the failure to recognize the act of creation and 
the relation of existences to being as given in the ideal 
intuition. 

The cosmists make God the substance or reality of the 
Cosmos, and deny that he is supercosmic ; but their error 
is manifest now that we have shown that God is the Creator 
of the cosmos, and all things visible and invisible. The 
cosmic phenomena are not phenomena of the Divine 
Being, but are phenomena or manifestations of created 
nature, and of God only mediante his creative act. The 
cosmos, with its constitution and laws or nature, is his crea- 
ture ; produced from nothing and sustained by his creative 
act, without which it is still nothing. God then, as the creator 
of nature, is independent of nature, and necessarily super- 
natural, supercosmic, or supramundane. as the theologians 
teach, and as all the world, save a few philosophers, scien- 
tists, and their dupes, believe and always have believed. 

God being supernatural, and the creative act by which he 
creates and sustains nature being a free act on his part, the 
theory of the rationalists and naturalists that holds him 
bound, hedged in, by what they call the laws of nature, is 
manifestly false and absurd. These laws do not bind the 
Creator, because he is their author. The age talks much of 
freedom, and is universally agitating for liberty of all sorts, 
but there is one liberty, without which no liberty is possible, 
it forgets — the liberty of God. To deny it, is to deny his 
existence. God is not the Fate, or inexorable Destiny, of 
the pagan classics, especially of the Greek dramatists. 
Above nature, independent of it, subject to no extrinsic or 
intrinsic necessity, except that of being, and of being what 
he is, God is free to do any thing but contradict, that is r 



EXISTENCES. 



81 



annihilate himself, which is the real significance of the Scho- 
lastic "principle of contradiction." lie cannot be and not 
be ; he cannot choose to be or not to be what he is, for he is 
real and necessary being, and being in its plenitude. He 
can do nothing that contradicts his own being or attributes, 
for they are all necessary and eternal, and hence St. Paul 
says, " it is impossible for God to lie.' 5 That would be to 
act contrary to his nature, and the Divine nature and the 
Divine Being are identical, and indistinguishable in re. It 
would be to contradict his very being, his own eternal, 
immutable, and indestructible essence, and what is called the 
nature of things. 

Saving this, God is free to do whatever he will, for extrin- 
sic to him and his act nothing is possible or impossible ; 
since extrinsic to him there is simply nothing. His liberty 
is as universal and as indestructible as his own necessary and 
eternal being. . He is free to create or not as he chooses, and 
as in his own wisdom he chooses. The creative act is there- 
fore a free act, and as nature itself, with all its laws, is only 
that act considered in its effects, it is absurd to suppose that 
nature or its laws, which it founds and upholds, can bind him, 
restrict him, or in any way interfere with his absolute freedom. 
God cannot act contrary to his own most perfect nature or 
being, but nothing except his own perfection can determine 
his actions or his providence. Following out the ideal judg- 
ment, or considering the principles intuitively given, they 
are alike the principles of the natural and of the supernatu- 
ral. They assert the supernatural in asserting God as crea- 
tor ; they assert his providence by asserting that creation 
and conservation are only one and the same act, and the free 
act, or the act of the free, uncontrolled, and unnecessitated 
will of God. Hence also it follows that God is free, if he 
chooses, to makes us a supernatural revelation of his will, 
and to intervene supernatu rally or by miracles in human or 
cosmic affairs. Miracles are in the same order with the fact 
of creation itself, and if facts, are as provable as any other 
facts. 



XIII. GOD AS FESTAL CAUSE. 

We have in the foregoing sections proved with all the 
certainty we have that we think or exist, the existence of 
God as real and necessary being, and as the free, intelligent^ 

Vol. H.— 6 



82 



REFUTATION" OF ATHEISM. 



voluntary, and therefore personal Creator and Upholder of 
the universe and all things therein visible and invisible, in 
accordance with the teachings of Christian theism, and the 
primitive and universal tradition of the race, especially of 
the more enlightened and progressive portion of the race. 
This would seem to suffice to complete our task, and to 
redeem our promiss to refute Atheism and to prove Theism. 

But we have only proved the existence of God as First 
Cause, and that all existences proceed from him by way of 
creation, in opposition to generation, emanation, evolution, 
or formation. We have established indeed, that the physi- 
cal laws of the universe, the natural laws treated by our 
scientists, are from God, created by him, and subject to his 
will, or existing and operative only through his free creative 
act. But this, if we go no further, is only a speculative 
truth, and has no bearing on practical life. Stopping there, 
we might well say, with Jefferson, u What does it matter to 
m3, whether my neighbor believes in one God, or twenty ? 
It neither breaks my leg, nor picks my pocket." God as 
first cause is the physical Governor, not the moral Governor 
of the universe, a physical, not a moral Providence, and his 
laws execute themselves without the concurrence of the 
will of his creatures, as the lightning that rends the 
oak, the winds and waves that scatter and sink our richly 
freighted argosies, the fire that devastates our cities, respira- 
tion by the lungs, the circulation of the blood by the heart, the 
secretion of bile by the liver or of the gastric juice by the 
stomach, the growth of plants and animals, indeed all the 
facts or groups of facts called natural laws, studied, described, 
and classified by our scientists, and knowledge of which 
passes in our day for science, and even for philosophy. The 
knowledge of these facts, or groups of facts, may throw light 
on the 'laws and conditions of physical life, but it introduces 
us to no moral order, and throws no light on the laws and 
conditions of spiritual life, or the end for which we are cre- 
ated and exist. . 

The man who believes only in God as first cause differs 
not, practically, from the man who believes in no God at 
all : and it is, no doubt, owing to the fact that the age stops 
with God as first cause, that it is so tolerant of atheism, and 
that we find people who profess to believe in Christianity 
who yet maintain that atheism is not at all incompatible with 
morality — people who hold in high moral esteem men who, 
like Ralph Waldo Emerson, Herbert Spencer, Professors 



GOD AS FINAL CAUSE. 



83 



Huxley and Tyndall, recognize no distinction between phys- 
ical laws and the moral law, and assert the identity of the 
law of gravitation and of purity of heart. Hence the Tran- 
scendentalist rule of life: "Obey thyself," "Act out thy- 
self," " Follow thy instincts ; " and hence also the confusion 
of physical or sentimental love with supernatural charity, 
the worship of the beautiful with the worship of God, and 
of art with religion, so characteristic of modern literature 
and speculative thought. Indeed, the first step in the 
downward progress towards atheism, is the denial or non- 
recognition of the theological order. 

We have proved that God is being, being in its plenitude, 
being itself, and being in itself ; therefore that he necessarily 
includes in himself, in their unity and actuality, all perfec- 
tion, truth, power, intelligence, wisdom, goodness, freedom, 
will, &c. We do not hold, with Cousin and Plato, that the 
beautiful is an absolute and universal idea, since the beauti- 
ful exists only for creatures endowed with sensibility and 
imagination, and therefore is not and cannot be absolute 
being or a necessary perfection of being; yet we do hold, 
with the Schoolmen, that ens, verum, and bomcm are abso- 
lute and identical. Hence St. Augustine teaches that exist- 
ence itself, since it participates of being, is a good, and 
consequently even the eternally lost are gainers by their 
existence, though by their own fault they have made it a 
source of everlasting pain. To be is always better than not 
to be. 

That God is the final cause of creation follows necessarily 
from the fact that he is its free, voluntary first cause. If 
God were, as Cousin maintains, a necessary creator, he could 
act only ad finem, not propter finem, and therefore could not 
be asserted as the final cause of creation ; but being a free 
creator not compelled by any extrinsic or intrinsic necessity, 
as he cannot be, since he is being in its plenitude, ens per- 
fectissimum, he can create onJy for some end, and conse- 
quently, only for himself, for besides himself there is and 
can be no end for which he can create. He is therefore the 
iinal cause of creation, as well as its first cause. Hence St. Paul 
tells us that "for him, and in him, and to him are all things." 
The conclusion is strengthened by considering that God, 
being all-powerful and essentially wise and good, it would 
contradict his own being and attributes to create without 
any end, or for any but a good purpose or end, and he alone 



84 



REFUTATION OF ATHEISM 



is good, for the very reason tliat he alone is being, and his 
creatures are being and good only by participation. 

No donbt it may be said that God creates for the good of 
creatures, but he is the good as he is the being of creatures, 
and he can give them good only by giving them himself, for 
besides himself there is no good for them, since beside him 
there is no good at all. The end or final cause of a creature 
is its good, and when we say God is the final cause or end 
of a particular existence, we say he is that which it must 
seek and possess in order to attain to and possess its supreme 
good or beatitude. When we say God creates all things for 
himself, we simply mean that he creates all things for the 
manifestation of his own glory in the life and beatitude of 
his creatures. The end or final cause of an existence is in 
obtaining the complement or perfection of its being. It is 
not simply beatitude, but beatitude in God that is the end. 
Creation flows out from the infinite fulness of the Divine 
Love, which would diffuse itself in the creation and beati- 
tude of existences, and God cannot beatify them otherwise 
than through their participation of his own beatitude^ 
God, then, is the ultimate and the final cause of creation. 

But why could not God create existences for progress, or 
for progress through infinity ? That would be a contradic- 
tion in terms. Progress is motion towards an end, and where 
there is no end there is and can be no progress. Progress 
is advancing from the imperfect to the perfect, and if there 
is no perfect, there can be no advance towards it ; if there 
is progress, it must finally come to an end. The doctrine 
of infinite or indefinite progressiveness of man, so popular 
in this nineteenth century, is based on the denial alike of 
creation and the final cause of man and the cosmos. It 
supposes development instead of creation, and admits only 
the physical laws of nature, which operate as blind and fatal- 
forces, like what is called instinct in man and animals. 
Hence we have a class of scientists who seek to elevate man 
by improving, through wise and skilful culture, the breed. 
How do these men who deny God as final cause, and hold 
the theory of development or evolution, account for the 
existence of moral ideas or the universal belief in a moral 
law ? This belief and these ideas cannot be obtained either 
by observation or by induction from the study of the phys- 
ical laws of nature ; and if we hold them to be given intui- 
tively, we assert their reality, affirm that there is a moral 
order, and then, a final cause of creation. 



GOD AS FINAL CAUSE. 



85 



We maintain that the soul really has intuition of God as 
ilnal cause in a sense analogous to that in which we have 
seen it has intuition of being as first cause. St. Thomas, 
while he denies that God is per se notus, concedes* that we 
have intuition of him, as we have explained intuition, or a 
confused cognition of him as the beatitude of man. The 
soul, he says, naturally desires beatitude, and what it natu- 
rally desires, it naturally apprehends, though it be confusedly. 
In our language, the soul desires beatitude ; but it cannot 
desire what it has no intuition of, or what is in no sense 
presented or affirmed to it, and since God is himself this beati- 
tude, the soul must have some intuition of God as its good 
or final cause. It is true, St. Thomas says, the soul does not 
know explicitly that it is God that presents or affirms him- 
self as the beatitude it desires. It does not know that it is 
God any more than it does when it sees a man coming with- 
out being able to distinguish whether it is Peter or some 
other man that is coming ; yet it is as really intuition of 
Ood as final cause, as the intuition of the idea is intuition 
of God as real and necessary being, or as first cause. In 
neither case is there a distinct or explicit cognition that what 
is presented is God, and it comes to know that it is so only 
by reflection. 

Certainly every soul desires happiness, supreme beatitude ; 
and desire is more than a simple want. Desire is an affec- 
tion of the will, a reaching forth of the soul towards the 
object desired. What a man desires he, in some degree at 
least, wills ; but will is not a faculty that can in any degree 
act without light or intelligence. The soul can will only 
what is presented to it as good ; it cannot will evil for the 
reason that it is evil, though it may will the lesser good 
instead of the greater, 'and a present good instead of a dis- 
tant or future good ; for it has the freedom of choice. Yet 
it is certain that the soul finds its complete satisfaction in no 
natural or created good. It craves an unbounded good, and 
will be satisfied with nothing finite. Why, but because it 
has an ever-present intuition that it was made for an infinite 
good? Why, but because God the infinite everywhere and 
at every instant presents or affirms himself to the soul as 
that alone which can fill it, or constitute its beatitude ? The 
fact that every limited or created good is insufficient to 
satisfy the soul has been noted and dwelt on by philosophers, 



* Sum. Theol. P. I. qusest. 2, a. 1, ad lum. 



86 



REFUTATION OF ATHEISM. 



sages, prophets, and preachers in all ages of the world, 
and it is the theme of the poet's wail, and the source of 
nearly all of life's tragedies. Yet it is inexplicable on any 
possible hypothesis except that of supposing the soul was 
made for God, and has an intuitive intimation of the secret 
of its destiny. 

Assuming, then, the intuition of God as final cause in the 
desire of beatitude, the assertion of it rests on the same 
authority that does the assertion of the ideal as being, or 
being as God, and therefore, as our several analyses have 
proved, it is as certain as either the subject or object in the 
fact of thought, or as the fact that we think or exist. In 
fact, as we have already seen, it is included in the creative 
act of being as a free, voluntary act. Being cannot act 
freely without will, and no one can will without willing an 
end ; and no good being without willing a good end. No 
really good end is possible but God himself ; we may, there- 
fore, safely and certainly conclude God is our last cause as 
well as our first cause, at once the beginning and end, the* 
Alpha and the Omega of all existences, the original and end 
of all things. 

We are now able to assert for man a moral law and to give 
its reason in distinction from the natural or physical laws of 
the scientists. The physical laws are established by God as 
first cause, and are the laws or created forces operative in 
existences in their procession, by way of creation, from God y 
as first cause ; the moral law is established by God as final 
cause, and prescribes the conditions on which rational exist- 
ences can return to God, without being absorbed in him, and 
fulfil their destiny, or attain to perfect beatitude. This com- 
pletes the demonstration of Christian Theism. 

If God be the first and last cause of existences, they must 
have, so to speak, two movements, the one by way of crea- 
tion from God as their first cause, the other under the moral 
law, of return to him as their end, beatitude, or the perfec- 
tion of their nature, and the perfect satisfaction of its 
wants. These two movements found two orders, which we 
may designate the initial and the teleological. The error of 
the rationalists, whether in morals or religion, is not wholly 
in the denial of supernatural revelation and grace, but in 
denying or disregarding the teleological order, and in endeav- 
oring to find a basis for religion and morality in the initial 
or physical order, or, as Gioberti calls it, the order of gene- 
sis. Thus Dr. Potter, Anglican Bishop of Pennsylvania 



GOD AS FINAL CAUSE. 



87 



lately deceased, in his work on the philosophy of religion, 
asserts that religion is a law of human nature, that is, if it 
means any tiling, the law of his physical nature and secreted 
as the liver secretes bile. In like manner the ancient and 
modern Transcendentalists, Gnostics, or Pneumatici, who 
make religion and morality consist in acting out one's self, or 
one's instincts, place religion and morality in the initial 
order, and in the same category with any of the physical 
laws or forces of the cosmos. The modern doctrine of the 
correlation of forces, which denies all distinction of physical 
force and moral power — a fatal error — originated in the 
assumption of the initial order as the only real order. The 
creative act is not completed in the initial order, or order of 
natural generation, and does not end with it. Man is not 
completed by being born, and existences, to be fulfilled or 
perfected, must return to God as their final cause, in whom 
alone they can find their perfection as they find their origin 
in him as their first cause. The irrational existences, since 
they exist for the rational, and are not subject to a moral 
law, can return only in the rational. As the teleological 
order, as well as the initial, is founded by the creative act of 
God, it is equally real, and the science that denies or over- 
looks it, is only inchoate or initial, as in fact is all that passes 
under the name of science in this age of boasted scientific 
light and progress. 

We may remark here that though we can prove by 
reason that God is our final cause, our beatitude, because the 
Supreme Beatitude, it by no means follows that the soul can 
attain to him and accomplish its destiny by its natural pow- 
ers, without being born again, or without the assistance of 
supernatural revelation and grace. Our reason, properly exer- 
cised, suffices, as we have just seen, to prove the reality of 
the two orders, the initial and the teleological, but as God, 
either as First cause or as Final cause, is supercosmic or 
supernatural, it would seem that nature must be as unable to 
attain of itself to God as its end, or to perfect itself, as it 
is to originate or sustain itself, without the creative act. 
They who, while professing to believe in God as creator, 
yet deny the supernatural order, forget that God is super- 
natural, and that the creative act that founds nature with 
all its laws and forces, is purely supernatural. The super- 
natural then exists, founds nature herself, sustains ft, and 
is absolutely independent of it, is at once its origin and end. 

The supernatural is God and what he does directly and 



88 REFUTATION OF ATHEISM, 

immediately by himself ; the natural is what he does medi- 
ately through created agencies, or the operation of natural 
laws or second causes created by him. The creation of man 
and the universe is supernatural, and so, as we have seen, is 
their conservation, which is their continuous creation ; the 
growth of plants and animals, all the facts in the order of 
genesis, are natural, for though the order itself originates in 
the supernatural, the facts of the order itself are effected by 
virtue of natural laws, or as is said, by natural causes. Yet 
as God is not bound or hedged in by Iris laws, and as he is 
absolutely free and independent, there is no reason a priori, 
why he may not, if he chooses, intervene supernaturally as 
well as naturally in the affairs of his creatures, and if necessary 
to their perfection there is even a strong presumption that 
he will so intervene. If revelation and supernatural grace are 
necessar}' to enable us to enter the teleological order, to per- 
severe in it, and attain to the full complement or perfection 
of our existence, we may reasonably conclude that the infi- 
nite love or unbounded and overflowing goodness which 
prompted him, so to speak, to create us, will provide them. 
Hence revelation, miracles, the whole order of grace, are as 
provable, if facts, as any other class o£ facts, and are in their 
principle, included in the ideal judgment. 



XTV. OBLIGATION" OF WORSHIP. 

How or in what manner God is to be worshipped, whether 
we are able by the light of nature to say what is the worship 
he demands of us, and by our natural strength to render it, 
or whether we need supernatural revelation and supernatu- 
ral grace to enable us to worship him acceptably, are ques- 
tions foreign from the purpose of the present inquiry. All 
that is designed here is to show that to worship God is a 
moral duty, enjoined by the natural law, or' that the moral 
law obliges us to worship God in the way and manner he 
prescribes, whether the prescribed worship be made known 
to us by natural reason or only by supernatural revelation. 
In other words, our design is to show that morals are not 
separable from religion, nor religion from morals. 

The question is not an idle one, and has a practical bear- 
ing, especially in our age and country, in which the ten- 
dency is to a total separation of church and state, religion 
and morals. The state with us disclaims all right to estab- 



OBLIGATION OF WORSHIP. 



89 



lish a state religion, and all obligation to recognize and sup- 
port religion, or to punish offences against it, at least for the 
reason that they are offences against religion ; and yet it 
claims the right to establish a state morality, to enforce it 
by its legislation, and to punish through its courts all 
offences against it. Thus the government seeks to suppress 
Mormonism, not as a religion indeed, but as a morality. As 
a religion, Mormonism is free, and in no respect repugnant 
to the constitution and laws of the country ; but as a morality 
it is contrary to the state morality and is forbidden : and con- 
sequently, under the guise of suppressing it as morality, the 
law suppresses it, in fact, as religion. Is this distinction 
between religion and morality real, and does not the estab- 
lishment of a state morality necessarily imply the establish- 
ment of a state religion? Are religion and morals sepa- 
rable, and independent of each other ? A question of great 
moment in its bearing on political rights. 

Among the Gentiles, religion and morality had no neces- 
sary connection with each other. Ethics were not religious, 
nor religion ethical. The Gentiles sought a basis for moral- 
ity independent of the gods. Some placed its principle in 
pleasure. Others, and these the better sort, in justice or 
right, anterior and superior to the gods, and binding both 
gods and men. This was necessary with the Gentiles, who 
had forgotten the creative act, and held to a plurality of 
gods and goddesses whose conduct was far from being uni- 
formly edifying, nay, was sometimes, and not unfrequently, 
scandalous, as w T e see from Plato's Euthyphro and the 
Meditations of the Emperor. But it does not seem to 
have occurred to these Gentiles that abstractions are nothings 
and that justice or right, unless integrated in a real and con- 
crete power, is a mere abstraction, and can bind neither 
gods nor men ; and if so integrated, it is God, and is really 
the assertion of one God above their gods, the " God of 
gods," as he was called by the Hebrews. 

The tendency in our age is to seek a basis outside of God 
for an independent morality, and we were not permitted by 
its editors to assert, in the New American Cyclopedia, that 
" Atheism is incompatible with morality," and were obliged 
to insert "as theists say." But not only do men seek to con- 
struct a morality without God, but even a religion and a 
worship based on atheism, as we see in the so-called Free 
Religionists, and the Positivists, which goes further than the 
request for " the play of Hamlet with the part of the Prince 
of .Denmark left out." 



90 



REFUTATION OF ATHEISM. 



Even among Christian writers on ethics we find some who, 
in a more or less modified form, continue the Gentile tra- 
dition, and would have us regard the moral law as independ- 
ent of the will of God, and hold that things are right and 
obligatory not because God commands them, but that he 
commands them because they are right and obligatory. 
They distinguish between the Divine "Will and the Divine 
Essence, and make the moral law emanate from the essence, 
not from the will of God. If we make the law the 
expression of the will of God, we deny that the dis- 
tinctions of right and wrong are eternal, make them 
dependent on mere will and arbitrariness, and assume 
that God might, if he had willed, have made what is 
now right wrong, and what is now wrong right, which is 
impossible; for he can by his will no more found or alter 
the relations between moral good and moral evil than he can 
make or unmake the mathematical truths and axioms. Yery 
true ; but solely because he cannot make, unmake, or alter 
his own eternal and necessary being. 

The moral law is the application of the eternal law in the 
moral government of rational existences, and the eternal 
law, according to St. Augustine, is the eternal will or reason 
of God. The moral law necessarily expresses both the rea- 
son and the will of God. There are here two questions 
which must not be confounded, namely, 1, What is the rea- 
son of the law? 2, Wherefore is the law obligatory on us 
as rational existences ? The first question asks what is the 
reason or motive on the part of God in enacting the law, 
and, though that concerns him and not us, we may answer : 
Doubtless, it is the same reason he had for creating us, and 
is to be found in his infinite love and goodness. The second 
question asks, "Why does the law oblige us ? that is, why is 
it law for us ; since a law that does not oblige is no law at all. 

This last is the real ethical question. The answer is not, 
It is obligatory because what it enjoins is good, holy, and 
necessary to our perfection or beatitude. That would be a 
most excellent reason why we should do the things enjoined, 
but is no answer to the question, why are we bound to do 
them, and are guilty if we do not ? Why is obedience 
to the law a duty, and disobedience a sin ? It is necessary 
to distinguish with the theologians between the finis oper- 
ands and the finis operis, between the work one does, and 
the motive for which one does it. Every work that tends 
to realize the theological order is good, but if we do it not 



OBLIGATION OF WORSHIP. 



91 



from the proper motive, we are not moral or virtuous in 
doing it. We must have the intention of doing it in obedi- 
ence to the law or will of the sovereign, who has the right 
to command us. 

What, then, is the ground of the right of God to com- 
mand us, and of our duty to obey him ? The ground of 
both is in the creative act. God has a complete and abso- 
lute right to us, because, having made us from nothing, we 
are his, wholly his, and not our own. He created us from 
nothing, and only his creative act stands between us and 
nothing ; he therefore owns us, and therefore we are his, 
body and soul, and all that we have, can do, or acquire. He 
is therefore our Sovereign Lord and Proprietor, with supreme 
and absolute dominion over us, and the absolute right, as 
absolute owner, to do what he will with us. His right to 
command is founded on his dominion, and his dominion is 
founded on his creative act, and we are bound to obey him, 
whatever he commands, because we are his creature, abso- 
lutely his, and in no sense our own. 

Dr. Ward of the Dublin Review, in his very able work 
on Nature and Grace, objects to this docirine, which we 
published in the Review some years ago, that it makes the 
obligation depend on the command, not on the intrinsic 
excellence, goodness, or sanctity of the thing commanded, 
and consequently if, per impossibile, we could suppose the 
devil created us, we might be under two contradictory obli- 
gations, one to obey the devil our creator, commanding us 
to do evil, and our own reason which commands us to do 
that which is intrinsically good. What we answered Dr. 
Ward at the time we have forgotten, and we are in some 
doubt if we seized the precise point of the objection. The 
objection, however, is not valid, for it assumes that if the 
devil were our creator, God would still exist as the intrin- 
sically good, and as our final cause. On the absurd hypoth- 
esis that the devil creates us, this would not follow ; for 
then the devil would be God, real and necessary being, and 
therefore good, consequently, there could not be the contra- 
dictory obligations supposed. The hypothesis was intro- 
duced by one of the interlocutors in the discussion, as a 
strong way of asserting that obedience is due to the com- 
mand of our Creator because he is our creator, without refer- 
ence to the intrinsic character of the command. The intrin- 
sic nature of the command approves or commends it to our 
reason and judgment, but does not formally oblige. This is 



92 



"REFUTATION OF ATHEISM. 



the doctrine we maintained then, and which we maintain 
now, while Dr. "Ward maintained that the command binds 
only by reason of its intrinsic excellence or sanctity. 

We asserted that there is no distinction between the idea 
of God and the idea of Good. Dr. "Ward justly objects to 
this, and we were wrong in our expression, though not in 
our thought. "What we meant to say, and should have said 
to be consistent with our own doctrine is, that there is no dis- 
tinction in re between Good and God, and therefore to ask Is 
God good ? is absurd. Dr. Ward, we find in this work, Nature 
and Grace, asserts very properly the identity of necessary 
truths with being ; in his recent criticism on J. Stuart Mill 
he denies it, and says he agrees with Fr. Kleutgen, that they 
are founded on being, or God, but as we have remarked in 
a foregoing section, what is founded on God must be God 
or his creature, and if his creatures, how can these truths be 
eternal ? 

Dr. Ward's objection has led us to reexamine the doctrine 
that moral obligation is founded on the creative act of God, 
but we have seen no reason for not continuing to hold it, 
though we might modify some of the expressions we formerly 
used ; and though we differ from Dr. Ward on a very essen- 
tial point, we have a far greater respect for his learning and 
ability, as a moral philosopher, than we had before re-read- 
ing his work. He seeks to found an independent morality, 
not independent of the Divine Being indeed, but independ- 
ent of the Divine will. In this we do not wholly differ 
from him, and we willingly admit that the Divine will, dis- 
tinctively taken, does not ' make or found the right. The 
law expresses, as he contends, the reason of God, his intrinsic 
love and goodness, as is asserted in the fact that he is the 
final cause of creation, the supreme good, the beatitude of 
all rational or moral existences, and the law is imposed by 
him as final cause, not as first cause. But this is not the 
question now under discussion. Judgments of moral good 
may be formed, as Dr. Ward maintains, by intuition of neces- 
sary truths founded on God, or identical with his necessary 
and eternal being ; but we are not asking how moral judg- 
ments are formed, nor what in point of fact our moral judg- 
ments are; we are simply discussing the question why the 
commands of God are obligatory, and we maintain that they 
oblige us, because they are his commands, and he is our abso- 
lute sovereign Lord and Proprietor, for he has made us from 
nothing, and we are his and not our own. Hence it follows 



OBLIGATION OF WORSHIP. 



93 



that we have duties but no rights before God, as asserted by 
that noble Christian orator and philosopher, the lamented 
Donoso Cortes, and that what are called the rights of man 
are the rights of God, and therefore sacred and inviolable, 
which all men, kings and kaisers, peoples and states, aristo- 
cracies and democracies, are bound to respect, protect, and 
defend, against whoever would invade them. 

The objection to the doctrine of Dr. Ward's independent 
morality is that it is not true, and exacts no surrender of our 
wills to the Divine will. It is not true, for Dr. Ward him- 
self cannot say that the invasion of the land of Canaan, the 
extermination of the people, and taking possession of it as 
their own by the children of Israel, can be defended on any 
ground except that of the express command of God, who 
had the sovereign right to dispose of them as he saw proper. 
Abraham offering or his readiness to offer up his son Isaac 
was justified because he trusted God, and acted in obedience 
to the Divine command. Yet to offer a human sacrifice 
without such a command, or for any other reason, would 
contradict all our moral judgments. If one seeks to do what 
the law enjoins, not because God commands it, but for the 
sake of popularity, success in the world, or simply to benefit 
himself, here or hereafter, he yields no obedience to God. 
He acknowledges not the Divine sovereignty. He does not 
say to his Maker, " Thy will, not mine be done ; " he does 
not pray, " Thy will be done on earth as in heaven ; " and, 
what is more to the purpose, he recognizes no personal God, 
follows God only as impersonal or abstract being, and fails 
to own or confess the truth or fact that he is God's creature, 
belongs to God as his Lord and Master, who has the absolute 
right to command him, as we have shown in showing that 
God is man's sole creator. 

The essential principle of religion is perfect trust in God, 
and obedience to his sovereign will, the unconditional sur- 
render of our wills to the will of our Creator. This is only 
what the moral law enjoins, for the first law of justice is to 

five to every one his due or his own, and we owe to God, as 
as been seen, all that we are, have, or can do. This shows 
that religion and morality in their principle are one and the 
same, and therefore inseparable. There is then no morality 
without religion, and no religion without morality. He who 
refuses to keep the commandments of God and to render him 
his due, violates the moral law no less than he does the relig- 
ious law. Let us hear no more then of independent 



94 



REFUTATION OF ATHEISM. 



morality, which is only an invention to save the absolute 
surrender of our wills to the will of God, and is inspired by 
a, reluctance to acknowledge a master. 

But this is not all. If the moral law requires our unre- 
served obedience to the commands of God, it requires us to 
honor, love, trust, and obey him in all things, and therefore 
to worship him in the way and manner he prescribes. If then 
he is pleased to make us a supernatural revelation of his will 
and to promulgate supernatural ly a supernatural law, we are 
bound by the moral or natural law to obey it, when promul- 
gated and brought to our knowledge, as unreservedly as we 
are to obey the natural law itself. If Christianity be, as it 
professes to be, the revelation of the supernatural order, a 
supernatural law, no man who knowingly and voluntarily 
rejects or refuses to accept it, fulfils the natural law, or can 
be accounted a moral man. 

We have now, we think completed our task, and redeemed 
our promise to refute atheism and to demonstrate theism by 
reason. We have proved that being affirms itself to the 
soul in ideal intuition, and that being is God, free to act 
from intelligence and will, and therefore not an impersonal, 
but a personal God, Creator of heaven and earth and all 
things visible and invisible — the free upholder of all exist- 
ences, and therefore Providence, the final cause of creation, 
therefore the perfection, the good, the beatitude of all 
rational existences. We have proved his Divine sovereignty 
as resting on his creative act, and the obligation of all moral 
existences to obey his law, and to honor and worship his 
Divine Majesty as he himself prescribes. We can go no 
further, by the light of reason, but this is far enough for 
our argument. 

XV. TRADITION. 

We have now proved, or at least indicated the process of 
proving, with all the certainty we have that we think or 
exist, the existence of God, that he is real and necessary 
being, being in its plenitude, or as say the theologians, ens 
■perfectissimum, self -existent and self-sufficing, independent, 
universal, immutable, eternal, without beginning or end, 
supracosmic, supernatural, free, voluntary creator of heaven 
and earth and all things visible and invisible : creating them 
from nothing, without any extrinsic or intrinsic necessity, 
by the free act of his will and the sole word of his power ; 



TRADITION. 



95 



the principle, medium, and end of all existences, the 
absolute Sovereign Proprietor, and Lord of all creatures, 
the Upholder and moral Governor of the universe, in whom 
and for whom are all things, and whom all rational exist- 
ences are bound to worship as their sovereign Lord, and in 
returning to whom by the teleological law, they attain to 
their perfection, fulfil the purpose for which they exist, 
enter into possession of their supreme good, their supreme 
beatitude in God, who is the good, or beatitude itself. We 
have in this ascertained the ground of moral obligation, and 
the principle of all religion, morality, and politics. We 
have then proved our thesis, refuted atheism under all its 
forms and disguises, and positively demonstrated Christian 
theism. 

But, though we hold the existence of God may be proved 
witli certainty by the process we have followed or indicated, 
we are far from pretending or believing that it is by that 
process that mankind, as a matter of fact, have attained to 
their belief in God or knowledge of the Divine Being. 
We do not say that man could not, but we hold that he did 
not, attain to this science and belief without the direct and 
immediate supernatural instructions of his Maker. The race 
in all ages has held the belief from tradition, and philosophy 
has been called in only to verify or prove the traditionary 
teaching. Men believe before they doubt or think of proving. 
We doubt if, as a fact, any one ever was led to the truth by 
reasoning. The truth is grasped intuitively or immediately 
by the mind, and the reasoning comes afterwards to verify 
it, or to prove that it is truth. The reasoning does not origi- 
nate the belief, but comes to defend or to justify it. Hence 
it is that no man is ever converted to a doctrine he absolutely 
rejects, by simple logic, however unanswerable and conclusive 
it may be. 

Supposing the process we have indicated is a complete 
demonstration of the existence of God as Creator and moral 
Governor of the universe, few men are capable of following s 
and understanding it, even among those who have made the 
study of philosophy and theology the business of their lives. 
The greatest philosophers among the Gentiles missed it, and 
the scientists of our own day also miss it, and fail to recog- 
nize the fact of creation and admit no supramundane God. 
Even eminent theologians, as we have seen, who no more 
doubt the existence of God than they do their own, prove 
themselves utterly unable to demonstrate or prove that God 



96 



REFUTATION OF ATHEISM. 



is. Dr. Newman, for instance, whose Christian faith is not 
to be doubted, confesses his inability to prove the existence 
of God from reason, and in his Essay on the Development 
of Christian Doctrine, if he does not sap the foundation of 
belief in revelation, he destroys its value, by subjecting it 
to the variations and imperfections of the human understand- 
ing. His Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent is an 
attempt to prove the relativity of all science or knowledge, 
that in practice we assent to the probable without ever 
demanding or attaining to the certain, the apodictic, and 
is hardly less incompatible with the existence of God than 
the cosmic philosophy of the school of Herbert Spencer, 
from which it in principle does not, as far as we can see, 
essentially differ. 

If such men as Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Proclus, Her- 
bert Spencer, Auguste Comte, Emil Littre, and John Henry 
Newman are unequal to the process, how can we suppose 
that the doctrine that God is, originated in that or any pro- 
cess of reasoning ? Reason in the elite of the race may 
prove that God is, but how can reason, wanting the word, 
originate and establish it in the minds of the ignorant, 
uncultivated, rude, and rustic multitude ? And yet it is pre- 
cisely this multitude, ignorant and incapable of philosophy, 
who hold it with the greatest firmness and tenacity, and only 
philosophers, and such as are formed by them, ever doubt it. 
There is, no doubt, a true and useful philosophy, if one 
could only find it, but philosophers in all ages have been 
far more successful in obscuring the truth and causing doubt, 
than in enlightening the mind and correcting errors. Plato 
was little else than a sophist ridiculing and refuting sophists ; 
and in all ages we find so-called philosophers originating and 
defending the grossest and absurdest errors that have ever 
obtained, and we find them true and just only when they 
accord with tradition. 

Intuition, as we have shown, furnishes the principle of 
the demonstration or proof of the existence of God, with 
absolute certainty ; but ideal intuition, which gives the 
principle of cognition, is not itself cognition, and though 
implicitly contained in every thought as its condition, it 
becomes explicit or express only as sensibly re-presented in 
language, and the long and tedious analytical process per- 
formed by the reflective reason. To get at the ideal for- 
mula, which expresses the matter of intuition, we have had 
to use reflection, and both analytical and synthetic reason- 



TRADITION. 



97 



ing. The formula is obtained explicitly only by analyzing 
thought, the object in thought, and the ideal element of the 
object, and synthetizing the results of the several analyses. 
It is only by this long and difficult process that one is able 
to assert as the intuitive synthesis, Ens creat existentias, or 
the essential principles of theistic philosophy. It is so 
because ideal intuition, as distinguished from empirical intu- 
ition, is not open vision of the object presented, is not the 
soul's cognition or judgment, but the objective or divine 
judgment affirmed to the soul implicitly, that is, indistinctly 
in every thought or empirical judgment, and must be dis- 
tinguished from the empirical by the reflective or analytical 
activity of the soul, or, in the language of St. Thomas, 
abstracted or disengaged by the active intellect, intellect us 
agens, from the phantasmata and intelligible species in which 
it is given, before it can be explicitly apprehended by the 
soul, and be distinct cognition, or a human judgment, the 
complete verbum mentis. 

"When a false philosophy has led to the doubt or denial of 
God, this recurrence to ideal intuition is necessary to remove 
the doubt, and to make our philosophical doctrines accord 
with the principles of the real and the knowable ; but it is 
evident to the veriest tyro that not even the philosopher, 
however he may confirm his judgment by the intuition, 
takes his idea that God is, immediately and directly from 
it ; for this would imply that we have direct and immediate 
empirical intuition of God, which not even Plato pretended, 
for he held the Divine Idea is cognizable only by the mime- 
sis, the image, or copy of itself, impressed on matter, as the 
seal on wax, whence his doctrine and that of the Scholastics, 
of knowledge jper ideam, per similitudinem, per for mam, 
or per sjpeciem. 

We cannot take the ideal directly from the intuition, 
because we are not pure spirit, but in this life spirit united 
to body ; yet we have the idea in our minds before we can 
deny it, or think of seeking to demonstrate it. Hence it 
must be acknowledged, that though reason is competent to 
prove the existence of God with certainty when denied or 
doubted, as we think we have shown, it did not, and per- 
haps could not, have originated the Idea, but has taken it 
from tradition, and it must have been actually taught the 
first man by his Maker himself. 

The historical fact is that man has never been abandoned 
by his Maker to the light and force of nature alone, or left 

Vol. H.— 7 



98 



REFUTATION OF ATHEISM. 



without any supernatural instruction, or assistance, any more 
than he lias been left without language. The doctrine of St. 
Thomas is historically true, that there never has been but 
one revelation from God to man, and that one revelation was 
made in substance to our first parents, before their expulsion 
from the garden of Eden. This revelation is what we call 
tradition, and has been handed down from father to son to 
us. It has come down to us in two lines : in its purity and 
integrity from Adam through the Patriarchs to the Syna- 
gogue, and through the Synagogue to the Christian Church 
whence we hold it; in a corrupt, broken, and often a tra- 
vestied form through Gentilism, or Heathenism. The great 
mistake of our times is in neglecting to study it in the 
orthodox line, and in studying it only in the heterodox or 
Gentile line of transmission, all of which we hope to prove 
in a succeeding work, if our life and health are spared to 
complete it, on revelation in opposition to prevailing ration- 
alism. 

The reader will bear in mind that we have not appealed 
to tradition as authority or to supply the defect of demon- 
stration ; but only to explain the origin and universality 
of theism, especially with the great bulk of mankind, who 
could never prove it by a logical process for themselves, 
nor understand such process when made by others. Hence 
we escape the error of the Traditionalists censured by the 
Holy See. 

The error of the Traditionalists is not in asserting that 
men learn the existence of God from tradition or from the 
teaching of others, which is a fact verifiable from what we 
see taking place every day before our eyes ; but in denying 
that the existence of God' and the first principles of morals 
or necessary truth, what we call the ideal judgment, are cog- 
nizable or provable by natural reason, and in making them 
matters of faith, not of science, as do Dr. Thomas Reid, Sir 
William Hamilton, Dean Mansel, Viscount de Bonald, Bon- 
netty, Immanuel Kant, and others. This is inadmissible, 
because it builds science on faith, deprives us of all rational 
motives for faith, and leaves faith itself nothing to stand on. 
Faith, in the last analysis, rests on the veracity of God, and 
its formula is, Deus est Verax, but if we know not, as the 
preamble to faith, that God is, and that it is impossible for 
him to deceive or to be deceived, how can we assert his 
veracity or confide in his word? Knowing already that God 
is and is infinitely true, we cannot doubt his word, when we 



TRADITION". 



99 



are certain that we have it. This connects faith with reason, 
and makes faith, objectively at least, as certain as science, 
as St. Thomas asserts. 

God must have infused the knowledge of himself into the 
soul of the first man, when he made him ; for all the knowl- 
edge or science of the first man must have been infused 
knowledge or science, since the fact of creation upsets the 
Darwinian theory of development, as well as the Spencerian 
theory of evolution, and Adam must have been created a 
man in the prime of his manhood, and not, as it were, a 
new-born infant. What was infused science in him, 
becomes tradition in his posterity, but a tradition of science, 
not of faith or belief only. The tradition, if preserved in 
its purity and integrity, embodies the ideal intuition, or 
ideal judgment common to all men, and implicit in every 
thought, in language, the sensible sign of the ideal or intel- 
ligible, and which represents it to the active intellect that 
expresses it, renders it explicit, and therefore actual cogni- 
tion. 

It follows from this that the ideal judgment when re-pre- 
sented by tradition through the medium of language, its 
sensible representative, is even in the simple, the rustic, the 
untutored in logic and philosophy, who are incapable of 
proving it by a logical process or even of understanding 
such a process, really matter of science, not of simple belief 
or confidence in tradition. The tradition enables them to 
convert, so to speak, the intuition into cognition, so that 
they know as really and truly that God is, and is the cre- 
ator, upholder, and moral Governor of man and the uni- 
verse, as does the profoundest theologian or philosopher. 
Hence wherever the primitive tradition is preserved in any 
degree, there is, if not complete knowledge of God, at least 
an imperfect knowledge that God is, and this knowledge, 
however feeble and indistinct, faint or evanescent, serves as 
the point oVajjpui or basis of the operations of the Christian 
missionary among savage and barbarous tribes for their con- 
version. 

The tradition is not the basis of science, but is in the 
supersensible a necessary condition of science, and hence 
the value and necessity of instruction or education. The 
ideal judgment is, as ideal, not our judgment, but objective, 
Divine, intuitively presented to the soul as the condition 
and model of our own. We can form no judgment without 
it, and every judgment formed must copy or be modelled 



100 



REFUTATION OF ATHEISM. 



after it. But. as we have shown, we cannot take the ideal 
directly from the intuition, but must take it primarily from 
tradition or as re-presented through the senses in language, 
which is really what is meant by education, or instruction. 
But all instruction, all education, reproduces, as far as it 
goes, tradition, or depends ou it. 

As language is the sensible representation of the idea, and 
the medium of tradition, the importance of St. Paul's 
injunction to St. Timothy, to "hold fast the form of sound 
words," and of maintaining tradition in its purity and 
integrity is apparent to the dullest mind. The corruption 
of either involves the corruption, mutilation, or travesty of 
the idea, and leads to heathenism, false theism, pantheism, 
atheism, demonism, as the history of. the great Gentile 
apostasy from the patriarchal or primitive religion of man- 
kind amply proves. As tradition of the truths or first prin- 
ciples of science, which are ideal not empirical, had its 
origin in revelation or the immediate instruction of Adam 
by his Maker, we cannot fail to perceive the fatal error of 
those who seek to divorce philosophy from revelation, and, 
like Descartes, to errect it into an independent science. 
Revelation is not the basis of philosophy, but no philosophy 
of any value can be constructed without it. 



